ForestBench: A Unified Graph Framework for Evaluating Multi-Agent Collaboration

Multi-agent LLM systems improve reasoning by combining outputs from multiple agents, but interaction-heavy methods can introduce error propagation and high communication overhead. When agents exchange raw responses or reasoning traces, incorrect intermediate reasoning may be adopted and amplified, leading to confident but wrong consensus; multi-round communication also increases token consumption, latency, and inference cost. In this paper, we propose a controlled-communication coordination framework named DarkForest. DarkForest first keeps agents independent, so each agent produces an answer without seeing the others' outputs. It then parses the raw responses into structured candidate records, groups semantically equivalent candidates into clusters, and estimates a calibrated belief distribution over these clusters using agent reliability, confidence, parse quality, support-pattern reliability, and independence corrections. A coordinator receives only policy-permitted evidence from this belief state with controlled communication. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks show that DarkForest achieves leading overall quality, improves the strongest baseline by up to 30.7% on benchmark metrics, and reduces token consumption by up to $6.5\times$ compared with communication-heavy baselines.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate in enterprise environments, where work is distributed across specialized roles, permission-controlled systems, and cross-departmental procedures. However, existing enterprise benchmarks largely evaluate single agents with broad tool access, while existing multi-agent benchmarks rarely capture realistic enterprise constraints such as role specialization, access control, stateful business systems, and policy-based approvals. We introduce \textsc{EntCollabBench}, a benchmark for evaluating enterprise multi-agent collaboration. \textsc{EntCollabBench} simulates a permission-isolated organization with 11 role-specialized agents across six departments and contains two evaluation subsets: a Workflow subset, where agents collaboratively modify enterprise system states, and an Approval subset, where agents make policy-grounded decisions. Evaluation is based on execution traces, database state verification, and deterministic policy adjudication rather than natural-language response judging. Experiments with representative LLM agents show that current models still struggle with end-to-end enterprise collaboration, especially in delegation, context transfer, parameter grounding, workflow closure, and decision commitment. \textsc{EntCollabBench} provides a reproducible testbed for measuring and improving agent systems intended for realistic organizational environments.

Multi-agent systems achieve state-of-the-art outcomes through peer collaboration. However, when an agent in the pipeline silently drops a constraint, the system's final output may look correct even though the reasoning chain was quietly corrupted, and existing outcome-based evaluations are blind to such multi-hop process failures. To make these vulnerabilities measurable before deployment, we introduce AgentCollabBench, a diagnostic benchmark of 900 human-validated tasks spanning software engineering, DevOps, and data engineering. Each task isolates one of four behavioral risks: instruction decay (does a constraint survive peer pressure?), false-belief contagion (does a falsehood spread through consensus?), context leakage (does information bleed between tasks?), and tracer durability (does marked data reach the final agent?). Evaluating four modern LLMs (GPT 4.1 mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, Qwen-3.5-35B-A3B, and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct), we expose model-specific vulnerability profiles invisible to outcome-only evaluation; Qwen-3.5-35B-A3B, for example, leads on tracer durability and instruction stability, while GPT 4.1 mini leads on leakage containment and false-belief resistance. Beyond per-model differences, communication topology emerges as a primary risk factor that explains 7-40% of the variance in multi-hop information survival. The effect traces to a synthesis bottleneck specific to converging-DAG nodes: an agent weighing competing parent inputs discards constraints carried by a minority branch, a bottleneck structurally absent from linear chains. AgentCollabBench demonstrates that suboptimal topology can silently erase the safeguards of highly capable models, arguing that multi-agent reliability is fundamentally a structural problem and that scaling model intelligence alone is no substitute for architecture.