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arXiv AI By Andreas Zettl, Diego Gosmar

The Coordination Tax and the Heterogeneity Dividend: Break-Even Conditions for Multi-Agent LLM Pipelines

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The paper presents a closed‑form model that compares the coordination tax of multi‑agent LLM pipelines—comprising decomposition overhead and per‑handoff protocol cost—to the heterogeneity dividend gained by routing work to cheaper models. Using the Open Floor Protocol (OFP) on 135 HumanEval and ClassEval tasks, the authors find that the protocol adds only 7.2 ms per handoff, yet a planner‑coder‑reviewer pipeline is 3.22× more expensive and slower than a single strong model call, and does not solve more tasks. The study concludes that the benefit lies in selecting the appropriate model per task rather than in pipeline decomposition, as an oracle choice between two single calls solves 94.3 % of runs at half the cost of the strong call.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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