BRIDGE: Selective Boundary Repair with Dependency Graph Evidence in Multi-Agent Systems
Organizations: University of Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Fudan University · City University of Hong Kong ·
Abstract
Multi-agent collaboration has emerged as a critical paradigm for tackling complex, long-horizon tasks; however, while coordination protocols continue to advance, systemic failures at the inter-agent collaboration interface remain a pervasive bottleneck. In collaborative workflows, systems frequently suffer from broken handoffs---where critical task context is omitted, misrouted, or ignored despite each agent emitting locally plausible responses. To address this challenge, we present \method, a verifiable runtime control framework that treats handoff repair as selective intervention over explicit dependency graphs. Central to \method is an integrated fault-attribution and calibration pipeline, \dataset, which decouples execution dependencies and injects counterfactual handoff perturbations to provide empirical supervision for runtime intervention. Leveraging this diagnostic foundation, \method dynamically compiles observable interaction traces into a provenance graph to pinpoint unresolved dependencies, without accessing private agent states. It then evaluates candidate repairs through an empirical gate that weighs expected gains against disruption risks, and executes repairs only when formal local postconditions hold. Extensive evaluations across demanding benchmarks demonstrate that \method boosts task success by up to 12.3 absolute percentage points on SILO-BENCH and 11.1 on TeamBench. Across both backbones, \method maintains strict cost-effectiveness, adding as little as 2.0% marginal token overhead. Furthermore, on 562 handoff-relevant traces from the MAST benchmark, \method achieves 69.8% F1 in a single pass, establishing a reliable operational boundary for verifiable coordination repair.
Figures & tables
| Action Primitive | Prerequisite Condition | Intended State Change |
|---|---|---|
| ASK | Identified owner and valid query | Target evidence acquired from sender |
| INTEGRATE | Available evidence in recipient scope | Target evidence woven into outgoing message |
| VERIFY | Declared contract constraint | Verification certificate recorded in graph |
| DECOMPOSE | Complex unmet obligation | Message rewritten using visible local sources |
| RETRIEVE | Accessible local or public state | Missing context fetched into recipient scope |
| TeamBench | SILO-BENCH | |||
| Method | Full Pass (%) | Partial (%) | Full Success (%) | Partial (%) |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | ||||
| Native | 48.9 | 81.3 | 65.8 | |
| AgentAsk | 53.3 | 84.3 | 78.9 | |
| Self-Refine | 51.1 | 83.7 | 78.9 | |
| MOC | 54.4 | 84.4 | 82.2 | |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | GPT-5.6-Terra | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | F1 (%) | Tokens/trace | F1 (%) | Tokens/trace |
| Direct Prompting | 62.5 | 6,686 | 67.5 | 6,488 |
| AgentAsk | 68.4 | 14,268 | 68.4 | 13,982 |
| Self-Refine | 67.4 | 13,262 | 67.9 | 12,359 |
| MOC | 68.7 | 13,738 | 68.6 | 13,507 |
| VeriMAP | 64.2 | 13,478 | 69.4 | 14,917 |
| Configuration | Success Rate (%) | Net vs. Native |
|---|---|---|
| Native (Unassisted Host) | 63.3 | — |
| BRIDGE (Full System) | 75.6 | +12.3 |
| w/ Flat Checklist ( No Graph Provenance ) | 68.9 | +5.6 |
| w/ LLM Self-Gate | 70.0 | +6.7 |
| w/ Aggregate Utility Gate | 73.3 | +10.0 |
| w/o Historical Experience Adjustment | 70.0 | +6.7 |
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Execution Event | Graph Representation |
|---|---|
| Declared requirement | Obligation and fact identifier, with owner/recipient metadata |
| Message | Message/fact node with sender and recipient edges |
| Tool invocation | Action node linked to calling agent and tool schema |
| Tool execution output | Evidence node linked to producing action |
| Evidence consumption | Directed edge between fact node and consuming operation |
| Public verifier outcome | Verification relation within verifier’s declared scope |
| Parameter | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | Weight on verifier-helped outcomes ( ) | |
| 0.25 | Penalty on neutral/unchanged executions (latency and state perturbation) | |
| 2.0 | Penalty on verifier-harmed executions ( ) | |
| 0.25 | Weight on normalized resource cost | |
| 0.05 | Empirical harm-rate tolerance threshold ( ) | |
| 5 | Minimum required sample support per action–frontier segment |
| Backbone | Route / Segment | Episodes | Helped | Harmed | Utility | Admitted |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | ASK | 52 | 8 (15.4%) | 0 | No | |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | INTEGRATE | 25 | 12 (48.0%) | 0 | Yes | |
| GPT-5.6-Terra | ASK | 40 | 10 (25.0%) | 0 | No | |
| GPT-5.6-Terra | INTEGRATE (aggregate) | 12 | 4 (33.3%) | 0 | No | |
| GPT-5.6-Terra | INTEGRATE | 6 | 4 (66.7%) | 0 | Yes |
| Multi-Agent Framework | Positive Traces | Stratified Controls | Total Traces |
|---|---|---|---|
| MetaGPT | 182 | 182 | 364 |
| AG2 | 46 | 46 | 92 |
| Magentic | 43 | 43 | 86 |
| HyperAgent | 7 | 7 | 14 |
| OpenManus | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| AppWorld | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | GPT-5.6-Terra | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | F1 (%) | Tokens/trace | F1 (%) | Tokens/trace |
| Direct Prompting | 62.5 | 6,686 | 67.5 | 6,488 |
| AgentAsk (adapted) | 68.4 | 14,268 | 68.4 | 13,982 |
| Self-Refine (adapted) | 67.4 | 13,262 | 67.9 | 12,359 |
| MOC (adapted) | 68.7 | 13,738 | 68.6 | 13,507 |
| VeriMAP (adapted) | 64.2 | 13,478 | 69.4 | 14,917 |
| SILO-BENCH | TeamBench | |||
| Specification | DeepSeek | GPT | DeepSeek | GPT |
| Evaluation rollouts per task | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Instances / | 90 / 90 | 90 / 270 | 90 / 90 | 90 / 90 |
| Policy configuration | Corpus-calibrated | Corpus-calibrated | Zero-shot transfer | Zero-shot transfer |
| Max actions per boundary | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | GPT-5.6-Terra | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Method | Pass (%) | Partial (%) | Pass (%) | Partial (%) |
| Native | 48.9 | 81.3 | 46.7 | 79.6 |
| AgentAsk | 53.3 | 84.3 | 48.9 | 80.9 |
| Self-Refine | 51.1 | 83.7 | 47.8 | 79.6 |
| MOC | 54.4 | 84.4 | 48.9 | 81.3 |
| VeriMAP | 51.1 | 83.6 | 47.8 | 79.7 |
| Benchmark | Evaluated Model | Discordant ( ) | Significance Test |
|---|---|---|---|
| SILO-BENCH | DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | 16 / 5 | |
| SILO-BENCH | GPT-5.6-Terra (pooled) | 36 / 12 | |
| TeamBench | DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | 12 / 3 |
| Task Identifier | Gate Decision | Candidate Action | Local Verification | Final Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CR1_review_respond | Admitted ( ) | RETRIEVE | Verified | Pass |
| CR6_review_checklist | Admitted ( ) | RETRIEVE | Verified | Fail |
| GPT-5.6-Terra | DeepSeek-V4.1-flash | |||
| Component / Stage | Tokens/task | % of Native | Tokens/task | % of Native |
| Native Baseline Execution | 25,198 | 100.0% | 22,460 | 100.0% |
| Standard Agent Operations | ||||
| Prompt context variation | +523 | +2.1% | +818 | +3.6% |
| Output response variation | +65 | +0.3% | +598 | +2.7% |
| Subtotal: Agent Communication Channel | 25,786 | +2.3% | 23,876 | +6.3% |
Multi-Agent Coordination
Multi-agent coordination studies how autonomous agents align actions, share information, and divide work to achieve individual or collective goals.
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