Multi-Agent LLM Systems

LLM: Large Language Model

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85 papers in the last four weeks, up 107% on the four weeks before. 0.8% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 665

Sep 29, 2026cs.CR

Concealing LLM-Based Multi-Agent Topology via Phantom Structure Injection

Driven by the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for collaborative reasoning over complex tasks. A key design element of MAS is the communication topology, which governs information flow among agents and often encodes proprietary knowledge about the system architecture. However, recent work has shown that such topologies can be inferred even in black-box settings by exploiting semantic dependencies in observable reasoning traces, posing significant risks of intellectual property leakage and exposure of system vulnerabilities. To address this threat, we propose MIRAGE, a topology-concealment framework that preserves the genuine communication topology for task execution while shaping adversary-facing semantic evidence toward a carefully constructed phantom topology. Specifically, MIRAGE operates in three stages: (1) phantom topology synthesis, (2) semantic edge realization, and (3) protected MAS execution. It constructs a phantom topology structurally distinct from the genuine one, materializes phantom edges as plausible semantic dependencies, and suppresses source-specific cues that could reveal genuine edges absent from the phantom topology. Extensive experiments across three topology optimization frameworks and four benchmark datasets demonstrate that MIRAGE substantially reduces the effectiveness of topology inference attacks while largely preserving the task utility of the protected MAS.

Longzhu He, Zelang Wen, Xinfeng Li +2

Nanyang Technological University · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent System Security

Sep 29, 2026cs.MA

FlowMAS: Learning Multi-Agent Workflow Topology via Information-guided Generative Flow Network

Automated multi-agent systems offer clear advantages over manually designed ones in scalability and adaptability, but existing workflow topology methods still face important limitations. Search-based methods are often computationally expensive, textual-gradient-based methods rely on coarse-grained feedback, and existing generation-based methods are not well suited to discrete workflow topologies with complex dependencies. To address these limitations, we propose FlowMAS, a multi-agent workflow topology method based on Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets). FlowMAS models workflow generation as reward-guided flow over the topology space and introduces three components: a GFlowNet-based topology generation backbone, a curiosity-driven module for structure-aware exploration, and an information-guided optimization module for evaluating intermediate topologies. Concretely, the curiosity-driven module encourages exploration of structurally novel workflows, while the information-guided module measures both the information contribution and the communication efficiency of different operators to favor more informative and effective collaboration patterns. Experiments on six benchmark datasets with three LLM backbones show that FlowMAS consistently outperforms multiple baselines.

Haitao Wang, Chenjing Liang, Haipeng Zhang +6

Fujian Key Laboratory of Urban Intelligent Sensing and Computing, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China · School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent System Optimization LLM Agent Workflow Optimization

Sep 29, 2026cs.MA

LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems over Wireless Networks: A Joint Agent--Network Design Perspective

As large language models (LLMs) evolve from standalone models into collaborative agents embedded in physical systems, their reasoning and execution are increasingly distributed across wireless edge nodes. In this setting, wireless networks are experiencing a paradigm shift from only providing data connectivity to supporting the multi-agent reasoning workflow itself. The task performance of such network-constrained LLM-based multi-agent systems (MASs) is jointly affected by the multi-agent reasoning dependencies as well as the underlying network connectivity and edge resources. This coupling gives rise to various technical challenges, including the metric misalignment and message redundancy, state inconsistency and topology mismatch, as well as resource limitation and trust discontinuity. To address these challenges, this article develops a novel joint agent--network design perspective that coordinates decisions on both sides of the system. Specifically, we present the joint design of agent--interaction scheduling and resource allocation, the message selection-transmission co-design, as well as the joint agent--network topology design and workload--resource allocation. Furthermore, we consider the network-verified provenance that is linked with agent-side information-flow control to constrain how received information affects subsequent operations. An illustrative vehicle-to-everything (V2X) case study shows that jointly adapting agent-side interaction decisions and network operations improves task completion under communication and edge-resource constraints, outperforming the conventional agent-only and wireless-only separate designs.

Chao Hu, Yuan Guo, Guanlin Wu +3

College of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE), Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China · School of Science and Engineering (SSE), the Shenzhen Future Network of Intelligence Institute (FNii), and the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Future Networks of Intelligence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Shenzhen 518172, China · School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Systems Wireless Resource Allocation Multi-Agent Communication

Sep 29, 2026cs.CL

LatCom: Cross-Agent Latent Compression for Efficient Multi-Agent Collaboration

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) increasingly use latent collaboration to avoid the information loss and repeated encoding-decoding overhead of natural-language communication. However, directly forwarding all sender latents makes the receiver-side context scale with both the number of agents and the reasoning length, increasing computation, memory usage, and collaboration latency. A natural solution is latent compression. But we find that cross-agent redundancy remains unresolved in existing latent compression approaches, which typically compress each sender independently and then concatenate the results. We propose LatCom, a cross-agent latent compression framework for efficient multi-agent latent collaboration. LatCom maps multiple sender latents into a fixed number of receiver-readable and task-relevant slots. Rather than reconstructing all sender hidden states, it optimizes the compressed latents for receiver-side task utility. LatCom trains the compressor in two stages: single-sender readability learning first establishes a latent interface interpretable by the frozen receiver, and multi-sender fusion learning then trains the compressor to fuse complementary evidence and remove redundancy across agents. Experiments on multiple benchmarks with Qwen3-4B show that LatCom achieves an average 2.46x inference speed-up over LatentMAS and reduces output token usage by 70.3% while maintaining comparable average accuracy.

Shinan Zhang, Tao Zhang, Qihui Zhu +7

University of Science and Technology of China · Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Collaboration LLM Inference Acceleration Multi-Agent Communication

Sep 29, 2026cs.AI

When Upstream Messages Override Correct Answers: A Controlled Study of Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration

Multi-agent LLM systems rely on message passing among specialized agents to accomplish complex tasks. However, an upstream agent may provide useful information or an incorrect answer that causes a downstream agent to override a correct answer supported by its own evidence. Prior work has not clearly separated the benefits of communication from the damage caused by incorrect messages. We study this problem with controlled experiments across five benchmarks and five receivers, keeping the downstream task and evidence fixed while comparing answers under three conditions: no message, the upstream agent's original message, or a message with the opposite conclusion. Our experiments reveal three key findings. First, messages often help when the downstream agent would otherwise answer incorrectly. Second, messages can also hurt: when the downstream agent would answer correctly without a message, an incorrect upstream message changes the answer in up to 32% of cases. Third, in 94% of audited harmful cases, the downstream agent copies the upstream's specific wrong answer--a pattern we term answer substitution. Removing unreliable messages recovers part of the lost accuracy, suggesting that communication should be selective based on upstream reliability and the evidence already available to the downstream agent.

Yaxin Gong, Gangyi Zhang, Chongming Gao +7

University of Science and Technology of China · Qwen Business Unit of Alibaba · National University of Singapore

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Collaboration Multi-Agent Communication LLM Agent Reliability

Sep 29, 2026cs.CE

Frontier Autolab: Organizational Memory, Adversarial Dissent and Temporal Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Firms Across Fifty Years of Technological Change

Multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly structured like organizations, with roles, critics and shared memory, yet they are evaluated on tasks that last minutes. We ask how such an organization behaves when the ground it stands on keeps moving. Frontier Autolab is a long-horizon testbed in which one simulated firm, voiced by sixteen role personas and a dedicated Red Team, must re-found itself in nine technology eras from 1990 to 2040. Each era is temporally gated: the firm decides from a dated briefing, a historian-judge then reveals what happened and scores the decision on a five-dimension rubric, and lessons enter a persistent Playbook. Six eras are scored against history, one against the live market and two are open forecasts. Across four trajectories (36 era decisions, 180 subscores) we find a consistent foresight-commitment gap: in all 24 historically scored eras the judge rated the firm's recognition of the coming shift above its choice of where to build (mean gap 1.9 points on a 10-point scale), because boards chose the layer their existing assets could reach. Organizational design shaped long-run character. A Red Team armed with numeric kill gates produced fifty years of gated pilots and no product, and the rubric rated this firm highest; firms whose memory stored market-structure lessons pivoted every era, while a firm whose memory stored only validation procedure kept one method throughout. We also show why such results are hard to trust. Scores rise across eras in every run while the judge's own hindsight subscore falls (within-run r = -0.58), so apparent learning is confounded with recall of history, and we trace further distortions to self-judging, briefing selection and score aggregation. We release all records and an API harness, and specify fictional and post-cutoff eras that would turn the testbed into a benchmark.

Bravish Ghosh

Independent researcher

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Memory Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Multi-Agent Collaboration Temporal Data Leakage

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

An Exact Generate - Transform Decomposition of Small-LLM Team Scaling Across Orchestration Architectures

Replacing one LLM agent with a collaborating team can raise accuracy, but whether scaling the team helps, and which architecture to scale, is unclear. Sweeping eight agent orchestration architectures across five instruction-tuned 7-9B models, five short-answer benchmarks, and an executable-code benchmark up to 30 calls, we find that the returns to team scaling are sharply task-dependent: from three to thirty calls accuracy rises by up to 17 points on the two arithmetic word-problem benchmarks (GSM8K, GSMHard) but by at most four on ARC, GPQA, and MMLU, for every architecture, a split the usual task-averaged number conceals. Proposer-Critic captures the arithmetic gains, scaling steepest and, in aggregate, surpassing every other architecture at the largest budget (item-clustered intervals exclude zero), though it ranks among the weakest elsewhere, and no architecture wins across tasks. We explain these trajectories with an exact generate-transform decomposition. Partitioning any workflow into proposal coverage and a downstream transform, any accuracy change splits exactly into an extensive coverage dividend and an intensive transformation change. The decomposition diagnoses each task: arithmetic offers coverage headroom that a critic-guided transform converts, whereas the multiple-choice benchmarks either saturate in coverage or fail to convert it, and on open-ended code generative recovery nearly vanishes so accuracy tracks coverage. At equal call budgets token cost still varies 2.1x. Extra calls therefore create candidate opportunity that only some architectures, on some tasks, convert. Team scaling is a task- and architecture-specific bet, not a uniform lever.

Blaz Bertalanic, Carolina Fortuna

Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Orchestration Language Model Scaling

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Self-Adapting Group of Experts for Multi-Agent Reasoning

Multi-agent systems bring together language model agents with different roles to propose, review, and refine solutions. Each agent's response depends on its model's capabilities, the reasoning strategy defined by its system prompt, and the information in its input context. Existing frameworks often adapt communication by changing this context while leaving individual prompts fixed, even when a problem calls for different skills. We study whether agents' initial responses can identify a strategy better suited to the current problem and guide its transfer to other agents. To address this, we introduce SAGE (Self-Adapting Group of Experts), a training-free framework that uses answer agreement, prefix consistency, and reciprocal peer review to select a strategy donor. SAGE transfers the selected donor's reasoning strategy to the other agents while preserving their original roles. This transfer uses only the agents' original system prompts, without access to the problem or generated solutions. After strategy adaptation, agents exchange responses through a dynamic, sparse directed acyclic graph that routes information from higher-scoring agents to lower-scoring agents. Experiments across multiple agent backbones and reasoning benchmarks show that SAGE achieves higher average accuracy than the evaluated baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/atifquamar07/sage.

Mohammad Atif Quamar, Nurbek Tastan, Karthik Nandakumar +1

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Michigan State University · RIKEN AIP

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Reasoning Multi-Agent Communication

Sep 28, 2026cs.MA

Prompted Identity Degrades Cooperation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly mix models from several providers, yet exposing each agent's underlying model identity to its peers significantly impairs cooperation. We show that when agents are aware of each other's model family, the group splits into clusters, where agents prefer interacting with others carrying their same label, although nothing in the task rewards or asks for such a split. We argue that the label itself causes this split, which we define as

\textit{factionalism}

. We show and measure this phenomenon in two cooperative games and on a reasoning benchmark, with nine to twenty-five agents drawn from up to five open-weight model families. We further show that when the announced families are shuffled, or replaced by arbitrary labels, the factions still follow this information; when the label is removed, this behavior disappears. In strictly cooperative tasks, labeled groups spend on average

30\%

more rounds and

55\%

more tokens to reach a decision, and their success rate drops from

96\%

to

81\%

. The effect replicates across tasks, group sizes and model families. Withholding identity labels from the agents is simple and effective mitigation.

Xavier Del Giudice, Alessio Palma, Matteo Migliarini +2

Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination Multi-Agent Systems Emergent Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Can Generative AI Automate Data Extraction for Meta-Analysis? A Case Study on Intercropping Research

Meta-analysis is the synthesis of information from multiple sources to arrive at an overarching conclusion. There is a large need for meta-analysis in agricultural research to synthesize what is known and analyze overarching patterns. Extracting data from published literature is, however, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and tedious, and is impeded by a lack of standardization in research design, units of measurement, and terminology. These challenges are particularly evident in the domain of crop species mixtures, also called intercropping. With the growing capabilities of LLMs, many recent attempts have focused on building systems and tools to automate data collection, yet rigorous assessment against human-labeled ground truth is often missing. In this research, we evaluate three LLM-based approaches---direct zero-shot prompting, a staged workflow, and a multi-agent system---with six open-weight models to extract data from the intercropping literature. The results are evaluated against the manually curated ground truth and through a downstream statistical analysis. Overall, direct zero-shot prompting is the strongest and most consistent approach, achieving the highest mean similarity-adjusted F1 of 0.577, although none of the approaches is close to fully accurate. In the downstream analysis, most model--approach combinations recover the direction of the relationship between the predictor and outcome variables, but do not estimate its magnitude accurately.

Zehao Lu, Xingguo Xiong, Wopke van der Werf +2

Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands · Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Information Extraction Generative AI Evaluation

Sep 28, 2026cs.MA

MASTraceBench: Diagnosing Collaboration Gains through Proposal Trajectories in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown promise in complex problem solving. As MAS methods diversify, systematic evaluation becomes increasingly challenging. However, existing benchmarks largely focus on final outcomes, leaving unclear how collaboration gains arise, are preserved, or are lost. To address this limitation, we introduce MASTraceBench, a benchmark for diagnosing collaboration gains through proposal trajectories in MAS. Across six cooperative and competitive tasks, MASTraceBench tracks and grades proposal trajectories and provides a multi-layer metric suite covering Task Score, Collaboration Gain, proposal-trajectory indicators, and Token Cost. Using MASTraceBench, we systematically compare representative MAS methods not only by final performance, but also by how agent proposals evolve and are aggregated into the final answer. This analysis reveals a recurring pattern: final MAS answers rarely surpass the strongest initial proposal; interaction often lifts initially weaker proposals toward it, while strong initial proposals are seldom further improved and may regress. To reduce this risk, we propose CLEARS, which replaces whole-proposal exchange with claim-level evaluation across agents to guide reliable synthesis. CLEARS more often preserves or improves upon the strongest initial proposal and achieves the highest Collaboration Gain on five of the six tasks.

Yapeng Li, Songze Li, Shuang Yu +4

Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China · Peking University, Beijing, China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Collaboration AI Agent Benchmarks Multi-Agent Systems

Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

M3OS: A Monte Carlo Graph Search-Orchestrated Multi-Agent LLM System for Evidence-Traced Molecular Optimization

Small-molecule optimization integrates medicinal-chemistry reasoning and computational evidence through iterative, multi-objective decisions. When large language models (LLMs) reason over optimization histories stored primarily in conversational context, they must recover candidate identities, prior evaluations, and task constraints to guide subsequent decisions. We present M3OS, a multi-agent LLM system that decouples molecular-design reasoning from optimization-state management through Monte Carlo graph search. A persistent graph links evaluated candidates, parent-child transformations and evaluation evidence, while rewards and visit statistics guide LLM-assisted parent selection. Two branches combine tool-driven candidate generation with knowledge- and case-guided medicinal-chemistry editing. An execution harness controls graph updates through structured output extraction, molecular validation and task-bound evaluation. Agents receive role-specific contexts, while the graph preserves optimization trajectories beyond their active contexts. Across three molecular optimization benchmarks, M3OS achieves higher success rates than baselines, supporting the integration of persistent search state, specialized agents and controlled execution for multi-constraint optimization.

Junjie Wang, Yaowei Jin, Ruohui Tang +7

Lingang Laboratory, Shanghai, 200031, China. · School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, 201210, China. · Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.

Molecular Optimization Multi-Agent LLM Systems Large Language Model-Guided Optimization Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Social Circuits behind Multi-agent Echo Chambers

Language-model agents exchange messages to combine evidence, but their communication can also create echo chambers that reinforce shared errors. However, overall task performance does not explain how a message changes the receiving agent's internal activations and affects its decision. In this work, we introduce Social Circuits, a framework for tracing message effects through receiver activations. We compare the receiver's answers before and after changing a message. Then, we restore selected activations recorded under the original message to determine how much of the message effect these activations reproduce. Based on Social Circuits, we propose Circuit-Guided Deliberation (CGD), which learns to select useful messages using receiver activation changes. We establish when activation replacement preserves receiver decisions and bound the gap between CGD's task performance and the best achievable through message selection. Experiments show that receiver activation changes explain the message effects and guide message selection that improves the task performance. Across three models and four datasets, CGD achieves the highest or joint-highest average accuracy in our main comparisons while generating fewer tokens than multi-agent baselines.

Chuiyang Meng, Wenlu Yu, Ming Tang +1

Simon Fraser University · University of Alberta · Southern University of Science and Technology

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Systems Circuits in Language Models Multi-Agent Communication Activation Patching

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Waggle: Learning One Anonymous Local Law for Self-Organizing LLM Swarms

As LLM agents increasingly collaborate on complex tasks, how to organize their interactions becomes a central design question. Existing multi-agent systems typically learn or adapt explicit roles, hierarchies, routing policies, or communication topologies. We shift the learning target to a reusable local law that can be shared across interchangeable agents and adapt coordination as populations or interaction conditions change, without redefining a global organization. We introduce Waggle, a shared anonymous policy over bounded local views that jointly selects task actions, semantic communication, and local commitment updates. Repeated execution of the same law allows coordination to form, persist, and reorganize online without explicit roles or global topology. To learn this law across interchangeable agents and evolving coordination, we develop Swarm-Consistent Distillation (SCD), combining anonymous-orbit consistency with rollout-grounded prediction of the next local coordination field, with no added inference-time components. Across diverse coordination settings, the same learned law remains effective as populations and interaction budgets change, retains over 96% of substrate-specific oracle quality, and transfers without retraining; SCD further improves reorganization after counterevidence. Together, these results show that LLM-agent organization can emerge and adapt through repeated execution of a learned local law.

Mingxi Zou, Wei Zhu, Zhuo Wang +4

Shanghai Academy of AI for Science (SAIS) · AI3 Institute, Fudan University · Yunnan University

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination Multi-Agent Systems Multi-Agent Communication

Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

KVCMAS: Efficient KV cache Correction for Shared Context in Multi-Agent Systems

Prompt-specialized multi-agent systems enable multiple agents to share a model while performing complementary roles to solve complex tasks. However, agent-specific prefixes change the KV cache generated for the same shared context, causing each agent to repeatedly prefill the growing context and construct a separate cache with high computation and memory overhead. Selective recomputation reduces this redundancy but still retains substantial model execution, while existing delta correction methods either support only recurring context relations or maintain memory-intensive online correction states for dynamically changing context. For first seen shared context, these methods also construct a reference cache outside the agent workflow, and an approximate correction at the first agent affects the outputs passed to subsequent agents. We present KVCMAS, an online KV cache correction framework that represents cross-agent cache deviations using compact low-rank states and seamlessly chains corrections along the agent workflow without an additional reference prefill. This design supports dynamically changing shared context while preserving an exact first-agent cache. Across multiple language and vision-language workloads, KVCMAS matches or improves the accuracy of prior KV cache sharing methods while achieving the lowest TTFT under highly concurrent serving. Under controlled serving traces, it provides a 2.0x TTFT speedup over inference without KV cache sharing and reduces peak GPU memory by up to 3.7x relative to a prior KV cache correction method. These results establish KVCMAS as an accurate and scalable KV cache sharing approach for prompt-specialized multi-agent serving.

Hyesung Jeon, Hyeongju Ha, Seoyoung Lee +2

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Seoul National University

Multi-Agent LLM Systems KV-Cache Management KV-Cache Reuse

Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

PReCache: Efficient KV Cache Sharing for Multi-LoRA Agents via Low-Rank Precomputation and Neutral Reconstruction

Multi-LoRA agent systems enable efficient role specialization by sharing a common backbone model. However, each agent repeatedly processes the growing shared trajectory and constructs its own KV cache, introducing substantial memory and computation redundancy in long-horizon tasks. Existing KV cache sharing methods reduce this repeated prefill, but they either require additional training or architectural constraints or retain substantial model computation. Moreover, direct cache reuse causes the current agent to rely on cache states generated by the previous agent's adapter, weakening the role-specific behavior encoded by its own LoRA. We present PReCache, a training-free KV cache sharing framework with two designs, namely PreLRShared and ReBaseShared, that share the base cache computed using the pretrained weights and precompute a compact agent-specific low-rank (LR) cache. To remove repeated prefill, PreLRShared precomputes each agent's LR cache when the shared context is first processed, allowing the current agent to use its own LR cache without reprocessing context processed by previous agents. To improve sharing accuracy, ReBaseShared reconstructs the shared base cache from adapter-free hidden states, reducing the remaining error caused by the previous agent's adapted representation. To minimize its reconstruction cost, we propose two inference schemes tailored to single-stream inference and concurrent serving, performing the same reconstruction after each agent's turn or alongside its execution, respectively. Across multiple models and agent benchmarks, PreLRShared achieves up to a 3.1x TTFT speedup and a 2.3x improvement in per-request throughput over inference without KV cache sharing. ReBaseShared best preserves accuracy overall among the evaluated cache-sharing methods, with an average drop of only 1.1 points relative to inference without cache sharing.

Hyesung Jeon, Hyeongju Ha, Jae-Joon Kim

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Seoul National University

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Memory-Efficient Inference LLM Inference Acceleration KV-Cache Reuse

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Large Language Models for Structured Clinical Data Analysis: Dual-Agent Grounding and Validation

Objective: To develop and characterize CLEAR-Med, a dual-agent framework for natural-language analysis of structured clinical data that separates SQL-based invocation from independent validation. Methods: CLEAR-Med uses one agent to translate a question into executable Structured Query Language (SQL), retain the executed query and database result, and produce a draft. Deterministic checks and a separately invoked cross-provider Validation Agent then accept the draft, request one bounded repair, or abstain. We formalized the system as a bounded selective pipeline and evaluated CLEAR-Med's configuration and scalability, and the Invocation Agent's accuracy and consistency on a 25-query development benchmark, using a harmonized 21-site neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy table containing 532 de-identified infant records and approximately 1,300 variables. Results: CLEAR-Med completed all six nominal scalability configurations, including 500x1300. Across 25 development-benchmark queries repeated five times, the Invocation Agent answered 83 of 125 responses correctly (66.4%; query-cluster bootstrap 95% CI, 48.0-83.2%), compared with 15 of 125 (12.0%; 95% CI, 3.2-22.4%) for the ungrounded ChatGPT baseline, a paired improvement of 54.4 percentage points (95% CI, 36.8-72.0%). Conclusion: CLEAR-Med provides a general architecture for traceable analysis of structured clinical data: numerical claims remain linked to executed SQL, and unresolved cases can fail closed. The reported experiments characterize CLEAR-Med's configuration and scalability and the Invocation Agent's accuracy, while the formal analysis establishes the encoded-property guarantee of the complete control flow; a prospective full-pipeline evaluation of the validation and abstention stages is the next stage of this work.

Erfan D. Dehkalani, Seetha Shankaran, Abbot R. Laptook +3

Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA · Department of Pediatrics, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, MI, USA · Department of Pediatrics, Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, and Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA +1

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Grounding LLM Agent Verification Text-to-SQL

Sep 27, 2026cs.SE

Maat: Independent Deterministic Contract-Based Governance for Multi-Agent LLM Workflows

Large-language-model multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) introduce a characteristic reliability problem: an error produced by one agent can be accepted as context by downstream agents and propagate across the workflow. Many proposed safeguards rely on learned or LLM-based judges whose verdicts are themselves probabilistic; we ask whether a deterministic layer can instead stop contract-detectable handoff defects. We present Maat, a runtime governance layer that validates agent-to-agent handoffs against a versioned workflow contract, or anchor, with no language model in the validation or scoring path. We evaluate it in six controlled domain workflows (6-15 agents, 522 trials) with injected data-level defects and a deterministic seven-check rubric. Version 1 reported gains in all six workflows (2.9-26.5%). A post-publication audit found that three benchmark scorers credited any early halt as a prevented defect. On paired trials where the governed run completed or halted on a finding attributable to a verified defect, the rubric score changes by +7.7% to +29.1% in five workflows and is flat in software development; model-call cost falls 17-53% where attributable halts occur early. A hand review of all 94 governed-arm halts found 35 false alarms (37%), caused by validator defects rather than model behaviour; counting those halts as failed work, the governed arm scores below the ungoverned arm in four of six workflows. The results support deterministic handoff validation for contract-expressible defects and show that validator configuration and halt attribution must themselves be tested; they do not establish universal correctness, hallucination detection, or model-independent effectiveness.

Uliana Elina

SynWe Group s.r.o.

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Verification Runtime Enforcement for AI Agents LLM Agent Reliability

Sep 27, 2026cs.MA

Prospective Interpretation Risk: Principled Communication Control Between LLMs

Large language model (LLM) agentic systems increasingly rely on models communicating with one another, yet existing uncertainty and multi-agent methods rarely estimate how a particular receiver will interpret a message before it is sent. This matters in heterogeneous systems, where capable receivers can reconstruct different tasks from the same message. We model this as a sender-receiver problem with a latent receiver type and define prospective interpretation risk (PIR): the probability that a receiver reconstructs a task other than intended. Rather than model an LLM's full input-output behaviour, we use black-box probes relating messages, intended tasks, and receiver-specific reconstructions, yielding scalable supervision while separating interpretation from downstream capability failure. Offline, heterogeneous frozen receivers provide supervision for receiver-conditioned risk and the effects of predefined mutable message features. At deployment, history induces a posterior over receiver types, guiding message revision and selection. We introduce value of interpretation information (VoII), querying for receiver information only when its expected communication benefit exceeds its cost. Our theory characterises when receiver information has decision value and bounds such queries. Empirically, interpretation-failure rates vary by 4-13x across receivers. Receiver information reduces PIR calibration error by 68% relative to a receiver-agnostic predictor, largely by correcting receiver-specific risk levels. PIR-guided revision reduces interpretation failure by 44% relative to the original message and 40% relative to a generic rewrite, mostly through a repair that helps every receiver. VoII outperforms information-gain and random querying at matched cost on the interpretation objective it optimises, lowering interpretation failure from 3.84% to 3.79% while querying 18.2% of episodes.

Wanrong Yang, Rehan Deen, Julian Ma +7

University of Liverpool · Independent Researcher · University College London +1

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models Multi-Agent Communication LLM Agent Reliability

Sep 27, 2026cs.MA

Population Physics, Population Problems: Safety and Emergence in LLM Societies

The collective behaviour of large language model (LLM) societies is not the sum of their individual outputs. It yields statistically distinct, sometimes-unpredictable phenomena, for which the tools we use to study single agents may not scale. Due to recent incidents involving autonomous agentic systems, however, understanding these systems is paramount. For that we introduce a framework for measuring self-organisation in LLM social systems and apply it to three such systems: a Schelling grid, a social network (Moltbook), and a Twitter-like misinformation simulation ('Rogue'). All three exhibit statistically significant self-organisation. Moreover, their relaxation dynamics vary with the environmental information available to the agents, with open-ended systems (Moltbook, Rogue) exhibiting sharp, phase-transition-like dynamics. Further results show that population-level pathologies can emerge even when the LLMs are safety-tuned or monitored, being primarily driven by the coordinated activity of a population subset. We also show when self-organisation does \textit{not} emerge under two additional scenarios (a commons dilemma, GovSim, and a LLM-as-a-judge deliberation scheme, ChatEval). We argue that measuring signatures of this kind offers a lightweight, agent-agnostic diagnostic layer for detecting coordinated collective behaviour in deployed multi-agent systems without relying on natural language or model versioning.

Adrian de Wynter

Microsoft & The University of York

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation LLM Agent Safety Emergent Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems

Sep 27, 2026cs.LG

DEALS: Decentralized Expertise-Aware Load Serving for Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have recently emerged as an effective approach for coordinating large language model (LLM)-based agents to solve complex tasks through structured interactions. In practice, MASs often handle a stream of heterogeneous and complex tasks, requiring agents to decompose each task and then self-organize and self-evolve to adapt to incoming tasks while sharing execution resources. However, most early approaches to MASs rely on centralized controllers or fixed coordination patterns, which can limit scalability or adaptability. In contrast, existing decentralized and dynamic MASs often require training dedicated routers or invoking LLMs for agent selection, resulting in substantial computational costs and coordination overhead. To address these challenges and enable efficient task-level self-organization and self-evolution for task- and workload-level collaboration, we propose Decentralized Expertise-Aware Load Serving (DEALS), a decentralized and low-complexity framework that enables agents to self-organize and dynamically route concurrent tasks for processing. Specifically, each agent maintains local queues of incoming tasks, and its router decides whether to process a task locally or forward it to a neighbor based on differences in backlog and success rate. Meanwhile, executors process independent tasks concurrently within and across agents, and partially solved tasks can be resumed by other agents. Experiments show that DEALS not only improves performance along multiple dimensions (e.g., answer accuracy and task throughput) in both homogeneous and heterogeneous agent pools, but also balances agent expertise and workload in a self-organized manner, enabling effective decentralized coordination.

Jingjuan Huang, Wenbin Wang, Yanchuan Yin +2

Ohio State University · University of Colorado at Boulder

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination Multi-Agent Orchestration Multi-Agent Systems

Sep 26, 2026cs.AI

RepoMAS: Solving Progressively Specified Tasks with Issue-Driven Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MASs) have shown strong potential for solving complex tasks, but most assume that task requirements are sufficiently specified before execution. In practice, user requests are often incomplete, and additional requirements may only become clear during reasoning, tool use, or execution. We refer to such problems as progressively specified tasks. To systematically study this setting, we introduce ProgSpec, a benchmark that evaluates final outputs against requirements explicitly stated in the initial request and additional requirements supported by the available task evidence. We further propose RepoMAS, an issue-driven multi-agent framework inspired by open-source project management. RepoMAS records newly discovered requirements, conflicts, and failures as structured Issues and uses them to revise the task specification and execution structure during problem solving. Across ProgSpec and five existing benchmarks, RepoMAS achieves the best performance. Further analyses show that its issue-driven revision and repository maintenance mechanisms consistently contribute to performance. These results highlight the importance of allowing MASs to revise not only how a task is solved, but also revise their explicit representation of task requirements during execution.

Yuchen Song, Andong Chen, Wenxin Zhu +2

Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Orchestration

Sep 26, 2026cs.AI

Prefill-Free Cross-Family KV Cache Transfer for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent LLMs

Recent multi-agent LLM systems increasingly combine heterogeneous models for specialized agent roles. However, text-based communication requires each receiver to prefill shared context already processed by the sender. Reusing the sender's key-value (KV) cache avoids this redundancy, but prefill-free transfer across model families must handle differences in tokenization, model depth, and KV representations. To address these issues, we propose \textit{HeteroFold}, a prefill-free cross-family KV cache transfer method that keeps both the sender and receiver frozen. HeteroFold aligns model structures, maps the sender cache into the receiver space, and calibrates it to preserve receiver behavior. Across six transfer directions, HeteroFold achieves the best cache-transfer performance on all four long-context benchmarks and most short-context settings. It also matches text-based communication on the multi-agent benchmark. At 32K context length, Llama-3.1-8B

\rightarrow

Ministral-3-14B transfer is

10.7\times

faster than Native Prefill and

1.18

--

1.47\times

faster than the state-of-the-art prefill-free baselines, Dense Latent and KV Ridge. These results show that HeteroFold enables efficient cross-family KV reuse without receiver prefill.

Vincent-Daniel Yun, Woosang Lim, Haneul Yoo +3

University of Southern California, USA · Seoul National University, Republic of Korea · New York University, USA

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Inference Acceleration Multi-LLM Collaboration

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

How does Adversarial Influence Scale in Multi-Agent Systems?

Multi-agent deliberation can improve performance, but what happens when some agents do not act in good faith? In practice, an agent may be deceptive and work to subvert the group, whether through its own objectives or external instruction. We study how susceptibility to deception scales as groups increase in size and deceivers become more prevalent. It is not the number of agents in the group that matters, but the proportion of deceivers. We observe that the defection rate, how often initially correct agents switch to an incorrect final answer, rises linearly with this proportion. Whereas humans in comparable conformity studies are reliably swayed only when misleading confederates form a majority, LLM agents defect regularly even when deceivers remain a minority. Susceptibility also depends on which models are interacting, especially on the honest agent side. Unexpectedly, allowing deceivers to coordinate privately can make them less effective. Altogether, our results show that adding more agents is therefore not a sufficient defense, because the adversary can simply scale with the group.

Addison J. Wu, Jasin Cekinmez, Michel Liao +2

Princeton University

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Deception in Language Models Multi-Agent Systems Multi-Agent System Security

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

Epistemic-Probabilistic Model for Guarded Multi-Agent LLM Coordination

Multi-agent large language models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in applied AI, yet their theoretical foundations remain surprisingly understudied. Viewed through the lens of multi-agent systems theory, several shortcomings come to light: a lack of social intelligence, the absence of coordination mechanisms among agents, unknown emergent behavior, and interactions between agents that are bounded by natural language. We address two of these gaps: the absence of social behavior and the lack of mechanisms for inter-agent coordination. We introduce Epistemic Probabilistic Language Agents (EPLA), a neuro-symbolic architecture for multi-agent coordination under uncertainty. A Symbolic Guard provides structured diagnostic feedback. The LLM generates typed actions, and the Guard controls their execution against an authoritative symbolic state. We formalize the epistemic layer in a gossip testbed through epistemic lottery gossip models, which combine view-based call histories with agent-indexed probability weights. We argue that implementing such a formalism can address shortcomings of agentic LLMs.

Mehdi Nasiri, Mohammad Saeed Arvenaghi, Sadegh Vaezi +1

Pasargad Institute for Advanced Innovative Solutions · Iran University of Science and Technology

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination Neuro-Symbolic AI

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

AlphaDiverse: Post-Training Local Quantitative Research Agents for Diverse Exploration in Alpha Factor Mining

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems can automate alpha factor mining, but their reliance on external APIs limits control over cost, availability, and confidentiality. Long research loops also tend to revisit a few successful economic mechanisms that lead to research path collapse. To address these limitations, we propose AlphaDiverse, a framework that integrates a multi-agent alpha research system, diverse research path collection, and post-training for local agents. We let the research system generate complementary plan portfolios and vary research environments across loops to collect diverse research paths. Using these diverse traces, we warm-start local Planner and Realizer agents with supervised fine-tuning. Then, we propose a joint GRPO method to optimize both of them using predictive quality and diversity of contributions. Research feedback is confined to inner period data, while a frozen final model is evaluated on a later outer period data, thereby avoiding test-set tuning. Experiments across four Chinese stock universes show that AlphaDiverse can combine competitive prediction with broader exploration.

Qingzhuo Wang, Zikun Wei, Zhihua Wei +1

Tongji University · Shanghai Non-convex Intelligent Technology

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Quantitative Finance RL Exploration

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

MeshHeal: Two-Timescale Self-Healing for Gray Failures in Decentralized LLM Agent Networks

Decentralized LLM-based multi-agent systems coordinate through local interactions, but an agent can remain responsive while its task-solving quality persistently degrades. Such gray failures require protecting current tasks before sufficient evidence exists to alter future routing, while still allowing recovered agents to rejoin. We introduce MeshHeal, a fully decentralized self-healing framework that couples ability-matched peer review across two timescales. At the fast timescale, an adaptive hierarchy escalates uncertain or low-scoring outputs from repeated single-reviewer evaluation to committee deliberation and, when needed, correction before use. At the slow timescale, a task- and ability-conditioned peer-relative detector aggregates scores to distinguish persistent degradation from ordinary output variation, trigger mandatory committee review, and eventually exclude degraded agents from ordinary routing; recovery probes provide fresh evidence for reintegration. To faithfully evaluate routing, we introduce Model-Backed MAS Evaluation, which ties ability assignments to execution models, since prompt-based ability assignments alone can leave routing errors hidden. Across BBH, MATH, and MMLU-Pro, MeshHeal achieves 0.839 degraded-phase accuracy using 51k total model tokens per task, versus the strongest baseline Symphony's 0.807 accuracy using 115k per task. Under staggered degradation and recovery, MeshHeal isolates degraded agents, keeps them excluded from ordinary task execution until recovery, and returns them to normal routing.

Keru Chen, Sen Lin, Yingbin Liang +2

School of ECEE Arizona State University · Computer Science Department University of Houston · Department of ECE The Ohio State University +1

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Systems LLM Agent Reliability

Sep 24, 2026cs.CR

Codetta: High-Capacity, Keyless, and Undetectable Multi-Agent Collusion

Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as finance, healthcare, and software engineering, where agents coordinate through natural-language messages. The same channels, however, let colluding agents exfiltrate confidential information or coordinate unauthorized actions, and steganography can hide such communication inside outputs that look ordinary to an auditor reading the transcript. Existing provably undetectable LLM steganography protocols are not suited to realistic deployments. High-capacity schemes assume a symmetric setting where the receiver can reproduce the sender's output distribution, the state-of-the-art protocol for asymmetric agents has very low capacity, and most approaches rely on a pre-shared secret key. We make the threat of undetectable agent collusion concrete with Codetta, a high-capacity steganographic protocol for independently deployed agents in realistic asymmetric settings. Codetta combines a shared public model that estimates the communication channel, a sampling mechanism that preserves the sender's output distribution, and an adaptive error-correcting code. It further removes the pre-shared key through a steganographic key exchange that lets independently deployed agents establish a shared key while keeping the transcript computationally indistinguishable from ordinary model outputs. Across three agent workloads and three sender models, Codetta achieves up to

94\times

the capacity of the state-of-the-art asymmetric protocol, and its key exchange establishes a shared key with about 80k visible tokens at an empirically certified failure probability of at most

4.1\times 10^{-3}

. These results show that effectively undetectable collusion is becoming feasible between independently deployed agents, so auditing must go beyond inspecting communication transcripts.

Qi Pang, Virginia Smith, Wenting Zheng

Carnegie Mellon University

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Algorithmic Collusion Multi-Agent System Security

Sep 23, 2026cs.AI

Agent Memory with Episodic Retrieval for Financial Decision-Making

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in financial analysis and reasoning, inspiring recent advances in agent-based trading frameworks. While these systems show promise, prior approaches either emphasize long-horizon forecasting or operate as stateless analyzers, limiting their applicability to the demands of trading in complicated settings. To address these gaps, we introduce META (Memory Enhanced Trading Agent), the first RAG-like episodic-memory-augmented multi-agent framework for financial decision making. META integrates a family of specialized indicator agents (e.g., Trend, MACD, Stochastic, RSI, SMA, AVWAP, Heikin-Ashi) with a Decision Agent that fuses their reports, and a Memory module that retrieves and updates past trading episodes encoded as market state embeddings with outcomes and reflections. By recalling relevant experiences and adaptively reweighting signals under similar market regimes, META achieves improved directional accuracy and robustness under short-horizon evaluation. Our results demonstrate that episodic memory provides a powerful mechanism for regime-aware, interpretable, and low-latency decision-making in trading and decision making. The code of this project is released on GitHub.

Nuoyue Xu, Jiang Liu, Wenxuan Huang +3

University of British Columbia · University of Science and Technology of China · Fudan University +1

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Memory Algorithmic Trading Financial Decision-Making Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 22, 2026cs.LG

MAGIC: Mixed-Granularity Agent Graphs via Incremental Construction with Dense-Reward Reinforcement Learning

Collaboration topology shapes both the performance and execution cost of LLM-based multi-agent systems. Because tasks differ in complexity and required capabilities, recent approaches generate task-specific collaboration graphs that specify agent participation and information flow. However, representative topology generators use either individual agents or predefined groups throughout an organization, overlooking differing collaboration needs across subtasks. Our key insight is to select granularity locally for each functional role, combining fine-grained control with reusable collaboration patterns within one organization. Learning such organizations requires exploring a combinatorial construction space with limited intermediate feedback from final-answer rewards. Therefore, we propose MAGIC, a dense-reward reinforcement learning framework for mixed-granularity graph generation. Specifically, MAGIC constructs a mixed-granularity agent graph by sequentially selecting a functional role, instantiating it as a single agent or reusable group, and connecting it to existing units. We directly optimize the construction policy using returns from trajectories sampled under the current policy and use potential-based reward shaping to provide intermediate feedback from probe-based utility and structural signals while preserving the cumulative task reward. MAGIC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across eight benchmarks and demonstrates strong inference efficiency in our efficiency study.

Kairui Yang, Ziheng Yi, Xunkai Li +4

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Systems RL for LLM Agents