Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems often struggle to collaborate with new teammates whose strategies shift mid-task. Because agents execute multi-step or temporally extended skills, they frequently continue executing outdated plans long after public evidence shows that a partner has changed its skill. Existing methods either treat partner tracking as passive context-leaving the agent aware of the shift but slow to act-or replan indiscriminately. We introduce BayesBeliefAgent, which pairs a hierarchical LLM planner with a Bayesian tracking module. Rather than replanning constantly, our agent interrupts its current skill only when a partner's actions directly contradict the inferred skill. Beyond standard reward, we evaluate performance using replanning efficiency and the belief-action gap: the fraction of total decisions where an agent with a correct partner estimate executes a non-complementary skill. Across benchmark Overcooked environments, contradiction-conditioned control drastically narrows this belief-action gap while requiring an order of magnitude fewer replans than heuristic methods
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Belief alone is not enough. An LLM agent may correctly model its teammate yet still act redundantly if it does not revise its plan when partner behavior changes. BayesBeliefAgent addresses this by maintaining a Bayesian posterior over latent teammate coordination skills, detecting visible contradictions, and triggering replanning when the current plan becomes stale. This turns teammate belief into coordinated, complementary action.
Figure 2: BayesBeliefAgent overview. From the teammate’s publicly observed primitive actions and the ego agent’s observation history, the agent maintains a posterior over the teammate’s active skill. Each newly observed teammate action is first evaluated under the previous MAP teammate-skill estimate. The posterior is then updated using the new observation. If the action is contradictory and the previous estimate is stable and sufficiently confident while the ego agent is mid-skill and out of cooldown, the current skill is interrupted and the LLM planner is queried using the updated posterior and MAP estimate. Otherwise, the agent continues executing its current skill.
Group 1 (Logistics)
Group 2 (Cooking)
Group 3 (Sourcing)
Agent
FC
Ring
Open
FC
Ring
Open
FC
Ring
Open
BP
95 (116)
927 (406)
1625 (457)
84 (159)
622 (246)
484 (179)
76 (130)
793 (228)
792 (334)
GAMMA
46 (79)
1124 (225)
1189 (415)
64 (111)
649 (159)
360 (114)
54 (77)
864 (216)
692 (167)
TALENTS
53 (91)
1019 (307)
1212 (193)
34 (60)
935 (298)
398 (158)
38 (49)
1237 (308)
1101 (321)
Hypothetical-Minds
11 (19)
388 (361)
608 (274)
0 (0)
188 (64)
369 (164)
0 0
275 (124)
480 (239)
ProAgent
0 (0)
313 (252)
732 (310)
0 (0)
161 (143)
388 (253)
9 (15)
271 (234)
549 (327)
Table 1: Coordination performance (mean reward ± std. dev.) across all three BP partner groups. FC = Forced Coordination. Best LLM-based result per cell in bold ; best overall underlined. BayesBeliefAgent outperforms all LLM-based agents.
Metric
Method
Open
Ring
FC
Skill acc. ( ↑ )
BayesBeliefAgent
0.79
0.71
0.61
ProAgent
0.78
0.71
0.60
Gap rate ( ↓ )
BayesBeliefAgent
0.20
0.28
0.42
ProAgent
0.41
0.38
0.47
Comp@3 ( ↑ )
BayesBeliefAgent
0.66
0.54
0.31
ProAgent
0.39
0.43
0.26
Table 2: Mechanism metrics averaged across partner groups G1–G3. Despite nearly identical teammate-skill prediction accuracy, BayesBeliefAgent reduces the belief–action gap and duplicate-skill rate and improves contradiction-conditioned recovery relative to ProAgent , with the largest gains in Open and Ring. Arrows indicate the improving direction.
Setting
Full
No prompt
No replan
No belief
Open G1
1533±410
1405±430
1190±455
1080±470
Open G2
337±270
305±250
263±152
274±290
Open G3
1420±390
1325±420
1110±440
1015±465
Ring G1
663±468
610±430
566±348
212±206
Ring G2
231±232
225±215
264±218
215±227
Ring G3
506±161
475±185
439±177
607±582
Table 3: We report the mean reward ± standard deviation across posterior-guided control ablations. Posterior-gated interruption generally outperforms posterior prompting alone, indicating its effectiveness as a control signal.
Setting
Full
Periodic-10
Compl./held
LLM-judge
Open G1
1533 / 2.0
1490 / 43.0
1510 / 169.0
1480 / 119.0
Open G2
337 / 1.8
515 / 15.0
304 / 50.4
403 / 34.0
Open G3
1420 / 3.0
1395 / 51.0
1370 / 115.0
1400 / 98.0
Ring G1
663 / 1.6
695 / 66.9
629 / 107.1
721 / 97.1
Ring G2
231 / 7.5
218 / 76.3
202 / 87.5
201 / 110.6
Ring G3
506 / 9.3
416 / 52.8
455 / 110.9
558 / 103.3
Table 4: We report the mean reward / replans per episode to compare replanning triggers. All LLM-planner conditions receive identical public observations and belief prompt; they differ only in the interruption signal. BayesBeliefAgent (Full) attains comparable reward with far fewer replans than the heuristic or LLM-based triggers.
Group
Behavior Feature
Reward(s)
Group 1 (Logistics)
Plating Ingredients
{−30,+20}
Washing Plates
{−30,+20}
Delivering Dishes
+20 (fixed)
Group 2 (Cooking)
Chopping Ingredients
{−30,+20}
Potting Rice
{−30,+20}
Grilling Meat
+20 (fixed)
Table 5: Event-weight configurations used to train the 12 BP partner policies. Within each group, the two non-fixed weights are crossed, producing four policies; the third weight is fixed across those four policies.
Parameter
Value
Prior smoothing α
1
Contradiction threshold θobs
0.04
Stability window K
3 updates
Replanning cooldown Ccool
6 steps
Macro-skill timeout
30 steps
Pass / PutDown likelihood weight
0.35
Table 6: Experimental hyperparameters.
Parameter
Value
Reward
Replans/ep.
Gap rate
Obs. threshold
0.02
1450
0.8
0.23
0.04 (default)
1533
2.0
0.17
0.06
1490
5.6
0.19
Conf. floor
0.55
1475
4.8
0.20
0.65 (default)
1533
2.0
0.17
0.75
1460
0.9
0.22
Table 7: One-at-a-time sensitivity analysis on Open G1. Defaults are shown in bold.
Setting
Δ Reward (95% CI)
Δ Gap (95% CI)
Open G1
+343[+75,+601]
−0.26[−0.35,−0.16]
Open G2
+74[−92,+231]
−0.15[−0.26,−0.04]
Open G3
+310[+42,+566]
−0.21[−0.31,−0.11]
Ring G1
+98[−131,+322]
−0.13[−0.23,−0.03]
Ring G2
−33[−165,+102]
−0.05[−0.14,+0.04]
Ring G3
+67[−58,+190]
−0.12[−0.21,−0.03]
Table 8: Paired Full − No replan differences with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals.
Setting
4o reward
5.2 reward
4o gap
5.2 gap
Open G1
1533
1485
0.17
0.19
Open G2
337
395
0.24
0.22
Open G3
1420
1360
0.20
0.21
Ring G1
663
705
0.25
0.23
Ring G2
231
285
0.32
0.29
Ring G3
506
470
0.27
0.28
Table 9: Reward and belief–action gap rate with GPT-4o and GPT-5.2 as the high-level planner backbone.
Setting
Method
Skill acc. ( ↑ )
Gap rate ( ↓ )
Comp@3 ( ↑ )
Dup. Skill ( ↓ )
Open G1
BayesBeliefAgent
0.82
0.17
0.71
0.12
ProAgent
0.81
0.43
0.36
0.31
Open G2
BayesBeliefAgent
0.76
0.24
0.61
0.18
ProAgent
0.75
0.39
0.42
0.29
Open G3
BayesBeliefAgent
0.79
0.20
0.66
0.15
ProAgent
0.78
0.41
0.39
0.30
Table 10: Mechanism metrics for the full agent and the No replan variant. Forced Coordination aggregates Groups 1–3. Arrows indicate the preferred direction.
Agent ( P0↓ , P1→ )
Bayes
Pro
GAMMA
TALENTS
Mean over P1
Open
Bayes
720.3 (256.8)
853.0 (738.8)
779.3 (373.9)
1917.0 (529.6)
1067.4 (474.8)
Pro
827.0 (582.2)
561.3 (675.2)
853.0 (372.5)
1934.0 (677.6)
1043.8 (576.9)
GAMMA
608.3 (86.1)
1698.7 (531.5)
440.7 (61.6)
1262.3 (74.1)
1002.5 (188.3)
TALENTS
1034.0 (195.4)
1305.0 (149.3)
1160.0 (216.1)
1390.7 (157.8)
1222.4 (179.6)
Mean over P0
797.4 (280.1)
1104.5 (523.7)
783.2 (256.0)
1625.8 (359.8)
–
Table 11: Zero-shot cross-play reward, reported as mean with standard deviation in parentheses. Rows identify the P0 ego agent and columns identify the P1 partner.
Multi-agent LLM systems have shown promise for complex reasoning, yet recent evaluations reveal they often underperform single-model baselines. We identify a structural failure mode in sequential fine-tuning of shared-context teams: updating one agent shifts the team's context distribution, and when subsequent updates are evaluated on cached rollouts, this mismatch compounds. We formalize this as the compounding occupancy shift and prove that stale-occupancy evaluation incurs a penalty that scales quadratically with the number of agents. In contrast, intermediate-occupancy evaluation reduces this to linear scaling. We propose TeamTR, a trust-region framework that resamples trajectories after each component update and enforces per-agent divergence control, yielding rigorous per-update and per-stage improvement lower bounds. Experiments show that TeamTR outperforms single-agent and sequential baselines with 7.1% on average, mitigates coordination regressions, and supports plug-and-play component replacement. Code is available at https://github.com/Yydc/TeamTR.
Yi Xie, Siao Liu, Falong Fan +3
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Arizona · Future Science and Engineering College, Soochow University · INSAIT, Sofia University ”St. Kliment Ohridski” +1
LLM-based multi-agent coordination faces a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and adaptivity in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically rely on repeated LLM invocations or multi-round communication to adapt decisions during execution, introducing substantial latency and making coordination vulnerable to asynchronous progress and environmental changes. Conversely, one-shot planning reduces coordination overhead but produces open-loop plans that can quickly become stale or fail when actions depend on other agents and the environment. We introduce SyncPlan, a plan-execute-correct framework for long-horizon coordination through explicit synchronization and adaptive correction. Given the state and team-level task, a centralized LLM coordinator generates per-agent action chains in a single planning call. During execution, explicit wait primitives and deadlock detection enforce inter-agent and agent-environment dependencies, while a lightweight Plan Staleness Detector continuously assesses the remaining plan and triggers replanning when environmental changes invalidate its assumptions. We further optimize the coordinator through SFT and planning-oriented RL with dense task progress and outcome-level execution feedback. Experiments on the public Overcooked benchmark and the complex Honor of Kings environment show that SyncPlan achieves state-of-the-art task success rates while using less than 0.05% of the wall-clock runtime compared with existing LLM-based coordinators. Code and datasets will be made publicly available.
Shen You, Xiaoming Zhu, Weining Weng +17
1City University of Hong Kong · 2Tencent · 3Shenzhen University +1
Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems enable complex, long-horizon reasoning by composing specialized agents, but practical deployment remains hindered by inefficient routing, noisy feedback, and high interaction cost. We introduce REDEREF, a lightweight and training-free controller for multi-agent LLM collaboration that improves routing efficiency during recursive delegation. REDEREF integrates (i) belief-guided delegation via Thompson sampling to prioritize agents with historically positive marginal contributions, (ii) reflection-driven re-routing using a calibrated LLM or programmatic judge, (iii) evidence-based selection rather than output averaging, and (iv) memory-aware priors to reduce cold-start inefficiency. Across multi-agent split-knowledge tasks, we show that while recursive retry alone saturates task success, belief-guided routing reduces token usage by 28%, agent calls by 17%, and time-to-success by 19% compared to random recursive delegation, and adapts gracefully under agent or judge degradation. These results demonstrate that simple, interpretable probabilistic control can meaningfully improve the efficiency and robustness of multi-agent LLM systems without training or fine-tuning.
Mohammad Parsa Hosseini, Ankit Shah, Saiyra Qureshi +3