Single-Agent LLMs Outperform Multi-Agent Systems on Multi-Hop Reasoning Under Equal Thinking Token Budgets

Chain-of-thought prompting has popularized step-by-step reasoning in large language models, yet model performance still degrades as problem complexity and context length grow. By decomposing difficult tasks with long contexts into shorter, manageable ones, recent multi-agent paradigms offer a promising near-term solution to this problem. However, the fundamental capacities of such systems are poorly understood. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze the expressivity of multi-agent systems. We apply our framework to three algorithmic families: state tracking, recall, and $k$-hop reasoning. We derive bounds on (i) the number of agents required to solve the task exactly, (ii) the quantity and structure of inter-agent communication, and (iii) the achievable speedups as problem size and context scale. Our results identify regimes where communication is provably beneficial, delineate tradeoffs between agent count and bandwidth, and expose intrinsic limitations when either resource is constrained. We complement our theoretical analysis with a set of experiments on pretrained LLMs using controlled synthetic benchmarks. Empirical outcomes confirm the tradeoffs between key quantities predicted by our theory. Collectively, our analysis offers principled guidance for designing scalable multi-agent reasoning systems.

LLM powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a promising paradigm for complex tasks. However, their advantages over single-agent systems (SAS) remain unclear, with performance varying inconsistently across settings. Here, we provide an information bottleneck perspective on elucidating the differences between MAS and SAS. Specifically, our key observation is that a SAS accumulates its full reasoning trace in one shared context, while a MAS uses isolated local contexts connected by bounded relay messages. We show that, under infinite relay bandwidth, any SAS can be simulated by a MAS that transmits the full upstream context. Thus, the nontrivial advantage of MAS arises under bounded relays, where compression introduces a fundamental trade-off: reducing redundant context can improve efficiency, but may also incur loss of task-relevant information. We formalize this trade-off as an information bottleneck controlled by an effective parameter $β$, which captures how the balance shifts with model capability, and shows that MAS gains arise when context reduction outweighs relay information loss. We conduct 18 controlled experiments across five benchmarks and three model scales to validate our theoretical studies. We observe that MAS consistently helps when relays are near-sufficient, especially for weaker models. In contrast, MAS gains shrink or reverse when relays incur information loss, especially for stronger models that can already extract useful information from redundant context and thus gain little from compression. Our study shows that multi-agent design is fundamentally an information-bottleneck optimization problem. This perspective explains when bounded inter-agent communication helps or hurts.

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have become a promising paradigm for complex information-seeking and reasoning tasks by enabling collaborative problem solving among specialized agents. However, existing MAS frameworks tightly couple task reasoning with coordination operations, including task selection, role assignment, message routing, and context management. As interactions grow, using powerful LLMs for these bounded control decisions introduces substantial token overhead and latency, limiting the scalability of agentic Web services. In this paper, we investigate whether coordination can be decoupled from expensive reasoning without compromising collaborative performance. We propose S1-MAS, a token-efficient multi-agent framework based on System One-guided computational division of labor. S1-MAS assigns bounded coordination decisions to lightweight System One models while reserving open-ended reasoning for capable LLM workers. Specifically, a lightweight controller selects inspection conditions, chooses subsequent tasks, and determines termination, while a compact reader retrieves condition-relevant evidence from authorized sources to support these decisions. Through a decision-evidence loop, selected tasks dynamically determine worker roles and source access, enabling adaptive collaboration without task-specific training. Extensive experiments on seven diverse benchmarks demonstrate that S1-MAS achieves superior accuracy while substantially reducing the inference cost. Across individual comparisons with AgentVerse, DyLAN, and SelfOrg on seven benchmarks, S1-MAS reduces GPT-4o token consumption by 44.9%-97.2% and measured end-to-end latency by 37.8%-93.0%. These results highlight its potential for scalable and cost-effective agentic Web applications.