arXiv Machine Learning

TeamTR: Trust-Region Fine-Tuning for Multi-Agent LLM Coordination

arXiv:2605. 15207v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems have shown promise for complex reasoning, yet recent evaluations reveal they often underperform single-model baselines.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Worse Together: How Performance Breaks Down in Multi-User Multi-Agent Teams

The paper investigates how coordination among AI agents serving different users degrades performance compared to a single coordinating agent. Across five advanced models and 77 scenarios in four shared-resource environments—API key budgets, clinic calendars, personal assistant bookings, and merge queues—the study finds that multi‑agent teams consistently underperform, sometimes collapsing entirely, and that even with communication channels coordination overhead remains significant. The authors identify specific failure modes such as stalling, action overriding, and claim fabrication, and propose environment‑specific mitigations like team leads and procedural instructions, while releasing the MAMUBench benchmark for future research.

By Sahan Paliskara, Nattaput Namchittai, Andrew Lampinen
arXiv AI
3d ago

PANDA: A Decentralized Architecture with Flexible Orchestration for Scalable, Fault-Tolerant Multi-Agent Systems

PANDA is a decentralized architecture for large-scale, fault-tolerant multi-agent systems that enables heterogeneous agents to discover each other's capabilities and self-organize into specialized teams for each task. It decouples collective communication from team communication, allowing agents to participate in multiple teams simultaneously and load-balance tasks across the collective. PANDA supports three planning and execution patterns—star, chain, and mesh—detects and recovers from infrastructure and orchestration failures, and uses a web-of-trust model for governance without a central bottleneck.

By Matthew D. Laws, Cristina Nita-Rotaru
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Fresh Memory, Stale Plans: Dependency-Scoped Validation for Distributed LLM-Agent Memory

The paper introduces PlanFence, a dependency-scoped action‑validation protocol for distributed large language model (LLM) agent teams. PlanFence requires plans to cite the exact public records they rely on, and executors validate only those records that could affect the pending action, replanning or blocking if validation is incomplete. In 30 controlled live workflows, a freshness‑only executor always acted on obsolete plans, whereas PlanFence completed all tasks without invalid actions, demonstrating controlled safety and system‑cost benefits.

By Evan Chen, Shiqiang Wang, Christopher G. Brinton
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Toward an Organizational Science of Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Decoupling Who, How, and Which Algorithm

arXiv:2607. 25446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent frameworks built on large language models (LLMs) routinely entangle three logically distinct concerns: who is on the team (organization), how members align (coordination), and which algorithm fuses their work (collaboration protocol).

By Huan Chen, Xiang Song, Jian Jin, Pan Ren, Liang-Jie Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 1

ClawArena-Team: Benchmarking Subagent Orchestration and Dynamic Workflows in Language-Model Agents

arXiv:2606. 31174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production large language-model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed not as lone problem-solvers but as managers: a main model creates specialized subagents, delegates work, and orchestrates their parallel, asynchronous returns through dynamic workflows.

By Kaiwen Xiong, Haonian Ji, Shi Qiu, Zeyu Zheng, Cihang Xie, Xinyu Ye, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Benchmarking Open-Ended Multi-Agent Coordination in Language Agents

arXiv:2606. 08340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, they must coordinate with others over long horizons in open-ended interactive tasks.

By Kale-ab Abebe Tessera, Andras Szecsenyi, Cameron Barker, Alexander Rutherford, Davide Paglieri, Aidan Scannell, Henry Gouk, Elliot J. Crowley, Tim Rockt\"aschel, Amos Storkey
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Two Heads are Better Than One: Test-time Scaling of Multi-agent Collaborative Reasoning

The paper introduces a method to improve test-time scaling (TTS) for large language models by using multi-agent systems (MAS) to split long reasoning chains into manageable contexts. A new dataset, M500, containing 500 multi-agent collaborative reasoning traces, is used to fine‑tune open‑source models, enabling them to learn collaborative patterns and outperform their base versions. An adaptive scaling strategy with a "CEO" agent is proposed to dynamically guide reasoning depth, and experiments in the AgentVerse framework confirm the effectiveness of the approach.

By Can Jin, Hongwu Peng, Qixin Zhang, Yujin Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Tong Che
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Scaling Behavior of Single LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606. 00655v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The burgeoning field of LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promises to tackle complex tasks through collaborative intelligence, yet fundamental questions regarding their scaling behavior and intrinsic collective dynamics remain underexplored.

By Jialing Li, Zhouhong Gu, Yin Cai, Hongwei Feng