arXiv AI
3d ago

Consistent Plan-Act for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

The paper introduces Consistent Plan-Act (ConPAct), a method that addresses coordination failures between high-level planners and low-level actors in long-horizon agentic tasks. By prompting both agents to produce structured state assertions and programmatically detecting contradictions, the authors identify a systematic planner-actor state mismatch. ConPAct feeds these detected contradictions back to both agents, fine‑tunes them on consistent interactions, and achieves notable performance gains, such as raising MiniGrid success rates from 38.6% to 54.4% with GPT‑5.6‑sol/terra.

By Heng-Zhuang Li, Yi-Kai Zhang, Yu Wang, Yueqing Sun, Jiayuan Zhang, Qi Gu, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Architectural Design, Not Only Model Intelligence, Governs Multi-Agent LLM Performance

The paper argues that the architecture of multi‑agent large language model (LLM) frameworks, rather than just the intelligence of the underlying models, largely determines system performance. It introduces a taxonomy of architectural dimensions—such as orchestration, memory, planning interfaces, specialization, and communication topology—and presents MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite. An empirical study across nine frameworks, keeping the LLM constant, reveals six design principles and shows that choices like orchestration and communication topology can dramatically affect latency, accuracy, and coordination success.

By Abdelghny Orogat, Ana Rostam, Essam Mansour
arXiv AI
2d ago

Agents Are Systems, Not Models: Rethinking Agentic Evaluation

The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.

By Luis Wiedmann, Leander Girrbach, Cordelia Schmid, Zeynep Akata