Agora: Enhancing LLM Agent Reasoning Via Auction-Based Task Allocation
Authors: Kaiji Zhou, Aleš Leonardis, Yue Feng
Organizations: University of Birmingham
Abstract
Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language model (LLM) agents requires effective orchestration of diverse expert models and tools. However, existing frameworks typically call APIs, based on coarse-grained matching between tasks and the functions of expert models or tools, while overlooking critical factors such as performance variability and cost efficiency among functionally similar alternatives. To address this, we propose Agora, a framework that uses a confidence-calibrated auction to dynamically allocate tasks to expert models and tools. By treating reasoning steps as tradeable items, Agora bases allocation on calibrated competence rather than raw confidence. Across five main benchmarks, Agora improves or remains competitive with single-model, routing, and cascade baselines under matched candidate pools.
Large reasoning models improve performance by generating extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but this behavior becomes inefficient when applied to LLM agents. Current LLM agents often generate verbose textual reasoning at every decision step and allocate reasoning effort nearly uniformly across turns, leading to substantial inefficiency in multi-turn agentic trajectories. We propose Adaptive Latent Agentic Reasoning (ALAR), a dual-mode framework that uses compact latent reasoning for routine turns and selectively escalates to explicit chain-of-thought when deeper deliberation is needed. ALAR learns latent reasoning by using the agent's actions as supervision anchors and is further optimized to use latent reasoning when it is sufficient for task success and reserve explicit CoT for harder decisions. Experiments on agentic search and tool-use benchmarks show that ALAR maintains comparable or better task accuracy while substantially reducing generated tokens by up to 43.6% in search and 84.6% in tool use. These results demonstrate that ALAR improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of LLM agents by reducing unnecessary textual reasoning while preserving explicit deliberation for harder decision steps.
LLM agents achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks but incur high latency and compute cost. In practice, many queries fall within the capability boundary of cutting-edge LLMs and do not require full agent execution, making effective routing between LLMs and agents a key challenge. We study the problem of routing queries between lightweight LLM inference and full agent execution under realistic cold-start settings. To address this, we propose BoundaryRouter, a training-free routing framework that uses early behavioral experience and rubric-guided reasoning to decide whether to answer a query with direct LLM inference or escalate to an agent. BoundaryRouter builds a compact experience memory by executing both systems on a shared seed set and retrieves similar cases at inference time to guide routing decisions. To evaluate this method, we introduce RouteBench, a benchmark covering in-domain, paraphrased, and out-of-domain route settings. Experiments show that BoundaryRouter reduces inference time by 60.6% compared to the agent while improving performance by 28.6% over direct LLM inference, outperforming prompt-based and retrieval-only routing by an average of 37.9% and 8.2%, respectively.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks, they frequently struggle with complex reasoning that requires long-horizon planning and iterative error correction. Furthermore, standard single-stream prompting proves brittle when models encounter novel abstractions or rigorous domain constraints. We introduce PoTRE (Poly-Topological Reasoning Ensembles), a heterogeneous framework that decouples inference into four agents: (1) Adversarial Refinement Agent, (2) Hierarchical strategic Planning Agent, (3) Spectrum Search Agent, and (4) Direct Chain Agent. A final Task-Adaptive Aggregation Layer dynamically reconciles these perspectives -- via final candidate selection, semantic synthesis, or neuro-symbolic verification -- to produce a robust global solution. We evaluate PoTRE on three frontier benchmarks: ARC-AGI-2, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), and PRBench Finance. PoTRE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 49.92% on HLE, surpassing the previous best official score. We demonstrate that this architectural heterogeneity achieves improved reasoning performance using similar or fewer inference tokens compared to heavily scaled homogeneous baselines.