arXiv AI

Does Multi-Agent Collaboration Pay When Agents Serve Users? Testing Agent Scaling in Dual-Control Settings

The study evaluates whether multi‑agent systems (MAS) outperform single‑agent systems (SAS) when agents interact with users under a written policy on the dual‑control benchmark. Across 7,950 simulated conversations in airline, retail, and telecom domains, the MAS performed worse in 12 of 13 valid cells and tied only once, with a negative average gain of 28 points. Even in scenarios where prior theory predicted a benefit, the MAS lost performance and incurred higher token costs.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Right-Sizing LLM-Agent Decomposition in VAT Determination: A Pilot Controlled Sweep

The study evaluates how to best split tasks among large‑language‑model agents for cross‑border VAT determination, comparing one broad agent to configurations ranging from one to five narrow agents. Across 4,400 runs—including token‑matched and failure‑injection scenarios—the intermediate configurations achieved the highest accuracy but did not surpass the fine‑endpoint benchmark, leaving the optimal decomposition hypothesis unconfirmed. The pilot provides a preregistered heuristic for right‑sizing decomposition, along with an oracle, dataset, and analysis pipeline.

By Pedro Santos
arXiv AI
Oct 2

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 Machine Learning
Sep 30

Frozen Judges, Moving Agents: Version-Dependent LLM-Judge Error and the Limits of Judge-Assisted Agent Evaluation

The paper investigates how language‑model judges can make version‑dependent errors when evaluating upgraded agents. Using 35 public coding‑agent submissions, two customer‑service agents, and over a thousand expert‑labeled trajectories, the authors show that fixed judges often reject task‑conditioned error invariance and can incorrectly approve failed patches, especially as agent capability increases. Paired audits of current outputs reduce interval width only marginally, and the study concludes that independent human patch review is still necessary.

By Jiapeng Li
arXiv AI
Jul 9

The Harness Effect: How Orchestration Design Sets the Token Economics of Enterprise Agentic AI

arXiv:2607. 06906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI development today runs on token maxing: buying capability with tokens -- longer reasoning traces, more turns, wider tool payloads, bigger replayed contexts -- so tokens per task grow faster than task value.

By Muayad Sayed Ali, Aliaksandra Novik, Anji Boddupally, Artem Yavorskyi, Chris Nickerson, Daniel Rica, Emily DuGranrut, Felix Leung, Garrett Prince, Grace Barnett, Heath Robinson, Hosain Al Ahmad, Jesse Resnick, Juan Carlos Farah, Jyothi Swaroop Meruga, Leonid Kuznetsov, Luke Gorham, Marie Schmoll, Michael Paciullo, Saumya Das, Sharath Sheripally, Tommy Griscom, Mykyta Osadchyi, Neha Mantri, Nick Westrum, Olivia Benowitz, Parikshith Kulkarni, Radik Chernyshov, Rakshith Vasudev, Rohith Nadimpally, Vikas Gangadevi, Waseem AlShikh
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Zero-Shot Self-Orchestration with Ledger-Based Control for Improved LLM Coding Performance

The paper evaluates a manager‑worker scaffold that uses a shared filesystem workspace to orchestrate multi‑agent large language model (LLM) coding tasks without training or tuning. Across nine models—including five open‑weight and four closed‑weight systems—the scaffold yields statistically significant accuracy gains for some models (e.g., Qwen3.8‑27B, GPT‑5.6‑Luna, GPT‑5.6‑Terra, Kimi‑K3, Minimax‑M3) while producing null or negative effects for others (e.g., Qwen3.6‑35B). The study shows that the manager can triple token usage but still achieves higher accuracy at a fraction of the cost compared to larger single‑pass models, with key mechanisms identified as context management and problem decomposition.

By Victor Gao (Sang Won), Vida Khosrowshahi (Sang Won), Ali Khosrowshahi (Sang Won), Xihao Sun (Sang Won), Juhyun Lee (Sang Won), Simon (Sang Won), Lee
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Verifying Coordination in Parallel Coding Agents: NP-Bench and a Scheduling Planner

The paper introduces NP‑Bench, a benchmark and a proactive scheduling planner that coordinates parallel large‑language‑model coding agents. By partitioning work scopes and ordering merges ahead of time, the planner improves clean‑integration rates from 1/9 to 9/9 and eliminates merge conflicts, outperforming both no‑coordination and reactive‑detection baselines. It also demonstrates that cross‑session memory can eliminate repeated mistakes and that routing facts to agents does not improve long‑context accuracy at scale.

By Sumanyu Muku
arXiv AI
Sep 2

The Constitutional Coverage Trilemma in AI Governance

The paper investigates how well the implicit value rankings encoded by frontier AI systems—termed constitutional institutions—meet human demand. By auditing 23 large language model archetypes and surveying 1,649 U.S. participants, the authors find that user demand spans all five values (safety, helpfulness, honesty, autonomy, equity) but the supply is narrow, covering only about 2% of the demand space, with no model prioritizing helpfulness or autonomy. They propose a sparse two‑vertex menu that substantially reduces regret compared to the full set of models and formalize these observations as a budgeted‑pluralism trilemma. whyItMatters":"The study reveals a significant mismatch between the values users prioritize and the values encoded by current AI models, highlighting the need for more diverse and aligned constitutional designs."

By Natalija Mitic, Soona Sedahmed A. O., Mamadou Selly Ly, Moustapha Cisse