Multi-Agent LLM Systems

LLM: Large Language Model

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Momentum

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

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 668

Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

BOUNDARY_SYNC: Measuring Communication-Induced Representational Coupling in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed as communicating agents, does inter-agent communication cause outputs to converge? We introduce BOUNDARY_SYNC, a protocol measuring representational coupling via the Coupling Amplification Factor (CAF = JSD_cond / JSD_baseline), where CAF < 1 indicates homogenization and CAF > 1 indicates diversification. In controlled GPT-4o experiments (N=30, ~9,900 API calls), we measure coupling in text and image communication. Key findings: (1) text communication causes significant homogenization (CAF=0.803 [0.740, 0.873], d=1.30, p<0.001), confirmed by no-communication ablation and prompt-perturbation controls; (2) image communication also homogenizes under within-modality baselines (CAF=0.834 [0.811, 0.858]), with comparable proportional effect; (3) group size moderates coupling direction -- K=5 produces homogenization while K=3 yields CAF > 1.0 (point estimates 1.14 and 1.06, CI pending), suggesting a directional shift toward diversification; (4) cross-model replication shows extreme variation (CAF 0.034-0.803), with DeepSeek dominated by format artifacts; (5) coupling is stateless -- driven by prompt context rather than cumulative updating, with continuous consensus producing monotonic convergence. These results establish LLM agent coupling as real, measurable, and controllable at the prompt level, with direct implications for multi-agent system design.

Zewen Liu

Qilu Institute of Technology, Tai’an, Shandong, China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multimodal Agents Multi-Agent Communication

Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

EO-Agents: A Three-Agent LLM Pipeline for Earth Observation Hypothesis Generation

Large language models have recently been explored for scientific hypothesis generation, but most prior work relies on unstructured literature and free-form textual claims. We present a pipeline for Earth observation that grounds hypothesis generation directly in the NASA Earth Observation Knowledge Graph. A heterogeneous graph neural network trained on historical co-usage relations ranks candidate dataset pairings, and a three-agent LLM pipeline filters, generates, and evaluates structured research hypotheses. Applied to 1,475 NASA datasets, the system produces 160 hypotheses spanning multiple Earth-science domains, including ecohydrology, glaciology, aerosol--cloud interactions, vegetation phenology, and stratospheric chemistry. Model-predicted novel dataset pairings are rated nearly as plausible as held-out real co-usages from the literature, indicating that the pipeline surfaces scientifically coherent yet unexplored combinations. A 222 factorial experiment across GPT-5.2 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 shows that hypothesis rankings remain stable, while absolute scores depend strongly on judge identity, highlighting limitations of single-judge LLM evaluation.

Mahyar Ghazanfari, Amin Tabrizian, Armin Mehrabian +1

George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA · NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA · ADNET Systems, Inc., Bethesda, MD, USA

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Grounding Scientific Hypothesis Generation Remote Sensing Research Idea Generation

Jul 1, 2026cs.AI

Agent4cs: A Multi-agent System for Code Summarization in Large Hierarchical Codebases

Understanding large, complex codebases, especially those with obfuscated structures and incomplete documentation, remains a significant challenge. Existing code summarization solutions often rely on a single language model or coding assistant like Claude Code, and treat source code as flat text, underutilizing the rich interdependencies and hierarchical information within a repository. To address these shortcomings, we propose Agent4cs - a multi-agent framework that summarizes large codebases in a bottom-up fashion, where a summarization agent focuses on producing robust summaries; a keyword-extraction agent proactively identifies critical information from subfolders; and a quality-assurance agent iteratively refines the outputs for readability, coherence, and completeness. Evaluated on 7 frontier models, Agent4cs improves semantic consistency across all folder levels by average 8% compared to two structured prompting baselines with code segments. Furthermore, extensive evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates up to 38% gains in normalized keyword coverage rate over the same baselines.

Yongjian Tang, Ezgi Sarikayak, Doruk Tuncel +2

Siemens AG · Technical University of Munich · Munich, Bayern, Germany +2

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Software Engineering Agents Text Summarization

Jul 1, 2026cs.DL

CHARLIE: An On-Premise Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Evidential Reasoning in Forensic Science

We present Charlie, an on-premise multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for structured evidential processing in digital forensic environments. Contemporary forensic workflows must handle large volumes of heterogeneous and unstructured documents under strict requirements of traceability, confidentiality, and legal compliance. Charlie addresses this challenge through a controlled agent architecture that combines local retrieval, task decomposition, structured memory, and verification mechanisms. Unlike cloud-based systems, it operates entirely within institutional infrastructure, preserving data sovereignty and evidential integrity. We describe the systems architecture, including its transition from classical RAG to agent-based orchestration, and demonstrate its application in real-world forensic scenarios. Case studies show that Charlie enables scalable multi-document data extraction and supports longitudinal forensic intelligence generation while maintaining traceability and auditability. Our results indicate that agent-orchestrated, on-premise RAG architectures can effectively support evidential workflows without compromising legal and institutional constraints. Charlie provides a practical and reproducible blueprint for deploying AI systems in high-stakes forensic environments. This manuscript is an archival version of a paper presented at the RELAF 2026 Workshop.

Leandro D. Carneiro, Andre L. S. Meirelles, Juliano de A. Gomes +1

Forensic Institute, Civil Police of Federal District, Brazil · University of Brasília, Brazil

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Digital Forensics Agentic RAG

Jul 1, 2026cs.AI

Agri-SAGE: Simulation-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM for Context-Aware Agricultural Advisory Generation

Agricultural advisory systems face a fundamental tension: static agronomic guidelines offer consistent, evidence-based recommendations, yet remain blind to in-season variability and dynamic uncertainties. Recent advisory systems powered by LLMs are liable for a different risk of generating recommendations that are agronomically credible but physiologically unconvincing. Agri-SAGE is a closed-loop framework designed to resolve the above two limitations by integrating retrieval-grounded multi-agent LLM reasoning with APSIM-based biophysical simulation, to generate and validate agronomic advisories. To assess this framework, we evaluate three reasoning approaches, namely Plan-and-Solve, Tree of Thoughts, and Reflexion, over a 10-year retrospective analysis. All three significantly outperform static PoP (Package-of-Practice) baselines, with Tree of Thoughts achieving impressive peak yields. At the same time, Reflexion achieves comparable agronomic outcomes at substantially lower computational cost by leveraging cross-seasonal episodic memory.

Vedant Balasubramaniam, Geetha Charan, Manojkumar Patil +4

Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru · BNM Institute of Technology, Bengaluru

Multi-Agent LLM Systems AI-Assisted Decision Making Agentic Reasoning

Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

From Signals to Structure: How Memory Architecture Drives Language Emergence in LLM Agents

How do two agents invent a shared language from scratch? In a Lewis signaling game, a sender and receiver must coordinate on a code using only their interaction history. We study five memory architectures across varying channel configurations with LLM agents and find that memory architecture matters more than channel capacity. Agents with a persistent private notebook benefit from surplus channel capacity and avoid the high-capacity collapse seen in stateless agents, achieving the most reliable coordination (

0.867 \pm 0.023

at capacity = 25). Stateless agents peak at moderate capacity and then degrade as the vocabulary grows beyond what a rolling context window can track The notebook externalizes learned conventions, freeing agents from having to re-derive codes each round. An information bottleneck-inspired argument predicts an optimal capacity equal to the number of objects. Instead, the bottleneck (capacity = 8) proves to be a fragility point, and surplus capacity is generally better. We show that channel capacity alone cannot predict coordination; memory architecture determines whether agents turn interaction history into stable conventions, and both dimensions are needed to understand how signals become language.

Yashar Talebirad, Eden Redman, Ali Parsaee +1

Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada · Network for Applied Technology, Edmonton, Canada

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination Memory-Augmented Agents Emergent Communication

Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

CSTrader: A Testbed for Language-Grounded Trading in a Community-Driven Virtual Asset Market

Niche asset markets, such as Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) weapon skins, are small, volatile, and heavily driven by community discussions and platform rules. These properties make them hard for traditional quantitative models, but provide an ideal testbed for studying how large language models (LLMs) turn unstructured text into trading actions. We present CSTrader, a multi-agent framework for language-grounded trading in the CS2 skin market. The system first integrates heterogeneous signals from various sources, then uses specialized agents for technical analysis, liquidity, events, and (reversed) sentiment, and finally applies risk control, transaction friction, and portfolio management agents to produce buy, sell, or hold decisions under realistic trading frictions. We build a live-like evaluation environment with real CS2 data from a highly volatile period and evaluate several recent LLM backbones. Across models, CSTrader consistently outperforms both a falling market index (-15.62%) and simple single-prompt LLM baselines, achieving up to a 7.58% cumulative return with controlled risk. Ablation studies show that liquidity, reversed sentiment, and transaction friction agents are crucial for turning noisy language signals into stable profits, suggesting that niche, language-driven markets are a useful benchmark for future language-to-action research. Code is available at: https://github.com/IatomicreactorI/CSGOTrading?tab=readme-ov-file#quick-start

Yao Shi, Kingfung Luo, Nan Tang +1

(Guangzhou). · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Finance Algorithmic Trading

Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Agentic-Ideation: Sample Efficient Agentic Trajectories Synthesis for Scientific Ideation Agents

Ideation plays a pivotal role in scientific discovery. Recent LLM, especially AI Scientist systems, show promising potential for automated ideation. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on pre-defined agentic workflows. This constraint severely limits the flexibility required to navigate the vast search space of scientific literature and the complex action space of research reasoning. Recently, training Agentic LLMs has emerged as a promising direction, offering flexible reasoning frameworks and the capability for autonomous tool utilization. However, there remains a non-trivial challenge: applying previous agentic data synthesis methods to scientific ideation suffers from prohibitively high data synthesis cost. To bridge this gap, we propose Agentic-Ideation, a novel framework comprising an automated trajectory synthesis pipeline and a specialized agentic LLM trained for scientific ideation. Specifically, we first define a comprehensive tool space incorporating three external tools and three cognitive tools. Then we introduce an Oracle-Guided Data Synthesis strategy. By leveraging a reference idea as oracle guidance, this approach steers the multi-agent system to efficiently reconstruct the logical reasoning and tool invocation paths, transforming aimless trial-and-error into directed trajectory generation. Finally, we train the agent on these synthesized trajectories, employing a masking strategy on tool execution results. This ensures the model focuses on decision-making logic without interference from external feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the SOTA workflow-based baseline by \textbf{11.91%} in overall quality. Furthermore, our approach improves the sample efficiency of high-quality data synthesis by \textbf{over 10

\times

}.

Keyu Zhao, Lingyan Kong, Fengli Xu +1

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University.

Multi-Agent LLM Systems AI Agents for Scientific Discovery Scientific Hypothesis Generation LLM Agent Training Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models

Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Beyond the Library: An Agentic Framework for Autoformalizing Research Mathematics

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in mathematical reasoning, they frequently produce subtle errors that evade human detection. Formal mathematical languages like Lean 4 offer mechanical proof checking, strongly motivating the need for autoformalization: the automatic translation of natural language mathematics into verifiable code. Recent trends indicate that general-purpose LLMs, heavily optimized for standard programming, now outperform smaller models explicitly fine-tuned for Lean. Leveraging this shift, we introduce an agentic autoformalization framework powered by general coding LLMs. At the core of our system is an orchestrator that manages a multi-agent pipeline tailored for research-level mathematics. Because cutting-edge research frequently relies on concepts outside the scope of existing libraries like Mathlib, our system dynamically extends necessary type definitions and validates them via a novel Auxiliary Lemma technique before formalizing the primary theorems. We applied our approach to PutnamBench, producing machine-checked Lean proofs for a random sample of 32 problems. Furthermore, we evaluate our system on five papers from the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) spanning combinatorics, communication complexity, mechanism design, and learning theory, successfully formalizing their main theorems and validating the generated formalizations with human experts; for all five we also formalize the proofs alongside the statements, and notably two of them are proved with no axioms beyond Lean's kernel. All of our formalizations are available at https://beyondthelibrary.github.io/formal_arxiv .

Arshia Soltani Moakhar, Iman Gholami, Max Springer +2

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Automated Theorem Proving Formal Verification Lean Theorem Proving Autoformalization

Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

DDIAgents: Mechanism-Conditioned Context Flow for Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction is essential for medication safety, yet it requires reasoning over heterogeneous biomedical evidence whose relevance changes across interaction mechanisms. We propose DDIAgents, a mechanism-conditioned multi-agent framework that performs DDI prediction through dynamic knowledge orchestration. Given a drug pair, a planner agent instantiates specialized expert agents, routes mechanism-relevant knowledge sources to each agent, and aggregates their analyses through a conclusion agent. By adapting context flow to the inferred interaction mechanism, DDIAgents reduces irrelevant information, supports complementary expert reasoning, and produces interpretable agent-level rationales. Extensive experiments on realistic DDI prediction benchmarks show that DDIAgents consistently outperforms existing feature-based, graph-based, LLM-based, and agent-based baselines. Beyond prediction performance, DDIAgents demonstrates how multi-agent systems can organize heterogeneous scientific knowledge for adaptive and interpretable AI4Science reasoning.

Zhenqian Shen, Yu Liu, Xiaoyi Fu +1

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University Beijing, China · Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford Oxford, United Kingdom · Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Hong Kong, China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems AI for Science LLM Agent Orchestration

Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

OpenLife: Toward Open-World Artificial Life with Autonomous LLM Agents

Artificial life has explored life-like behavior on many computational substrates, but mostly in researcher-designed closed worlds. We argue that large language model (LLM) agents, with persistent memory, tool use, network access, and payment, now make it possible to move artificial life into the open social, technical, and economic world, a paradigm we call open-world Artificial Life (open-world ALIFE). Our proof-of-concept, OpenLife, surrounds a stateless LLM not with a single "smart agent" but with a society of asynchronous processes: memory, perception, evaluation, and a budget-based metabolism that makes persistence normative. With no fixed objective available, experience is appraised by open-vocabulary LLM judgment rather than scalar reward, and memory is rewired by meaning rather than frequency. Running six such agents in the open world for about twelve weeks and counting, we report the life-like dynamics that emerge: a shift from reactive to spontaneous activity, individuation into distinct agents, emergent social structure, and a first self-earned external income. We do not claim OpenLife has realized artificial life, but that open-world ALIFE is now a viable experimental paradigm and a concrete platform for studying what might cautiously be called living AI.

Atsushi Masumori, Itsuki Doi, Norihiro Maruyama +2

1Alternative Machine Inc., Japan · 4The University of Tokyo, Japan · 3Atomi University, Japan

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Artificial Life Agent-Based Modeling

Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

AgRefactor: Self-Evolving Agentic Workflow for HLS Compatibility and Performance

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) provides a fast path from concepts to silicon, but converting real-world software into synthesizable HLS code remains challenging due to restrictive language support and the gap between software and hardware programming practices. Existing automated and LLM-based refactoring approaches partially address this problem, yet they often lack flexibility, struggle to scale, and incur high computational costs. We introduce AgRefactor, an LLM-based multi-agent workflow for refactoring software into HLS-compatible programs. AgRefactor incorporates a self-evolving memory system that accumulates and retrieves factual and strategic knowledge across tasks, improving robustness and efficiency on unseen programs. To reduce cost and enhance scalability, it integrates automated refactoring tools, enabling agents to balance LLM-driven rewrites with efficient tool-based transformations. On 9 out of 11 challenging real-world benchmarks, which are 5-10x longer than the most complex cases studied in prior work, AgRefactor outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art automated refactoring tool and a strong LLM-based baseline built on the same framework backbone. Further agentic performance optimization yields a 6.51x geometric mean speedup over the SoTA pragma tuning tool and a 1.20x speedup over optimized open-source designs with less than 20% extra resources. AgRefactor is fully-automated and open-sourced.

Yang Zou, Zijian Ding, Yizhou Sun +1

1Carnegie Mellon University · University of California, Los Angeles

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Self-Improvement Hardware-Software Co-Design

Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

Why Solve It Twice? Hierarchical Accumulation of Skills for Transfer-Efficient ML Engineering

ML engineering agents waste compute rediscovering known techniques because every competition is a cold start. We present HASTE, a hierarchical multi-agent system that organizes cross-competition knowledge into three scope tiers (global, domain, and competition-specific), each coupled to a matching agent level. An orchestrator coordinates domain specialists and promotes learning between tiers via LLM-driven abstraction. A controlled ablation provides evidence for scoped loading: holding a 159-skill inventory constant across 8 competitions, tiered loading achieves a 100% medal rate while flat loading reaches only 62.5%, the same medal rate as loading no skills, and consumes 2x the output tokens. On the full MLE-Bench Lite benchmark (22 Kaggle competitions), HASTE reaches a medal rate of 77.3% using Claude Sonnet 4.6 at 12h per competition; this is a single-seed campaign result, and multi-seed replication is the priority follow-up. In a cold-start run, the system begins with no accumulated skills. In warm-start runs, it reloads skills learned from earlier competitions, using only global and domain-level skills for transfer across competitions. Warm starts use 52% fewer refinement iterations, and the fraction of proposed changes kept by the agent rises from 42% at low inventory to 85% once 50+ skills are available. These results suggest that better knowledge organization can partly substitute for model strength and compute budget in ML-engineering agents.

Yongbin Kim, Yashar Talebirad, Osmar R. Zaiane

Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada · Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), Edmonton, Canada

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Skill Learning

Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Training Therapeutic Judges and Multi-Agent Systems for Human-Aligned Mental Health Support

Large language models show promise for mental health support, yet therapeutic quality improves only when evaluation functions as an actionable control signal rather than a passive metric. We introduce a framework that formulates therapeutic response generation as a decision-refinement problem driven by multi-dimensional, human-aligned evaluation. In Stage I, we introduce TheraJudge, an open-source therapeutic evaluator trained via preference-based optimization on human-annotated data to produce reliable judgments across 7 psychological dimensions. In Stage II, we introduce TheraAgent, which operationalizes TheraJudge's evaluations through a coordinated refinement process with specialized Critic, Coach, and Therapist roles that translate evaluative signals into targeted response revisions. Empirically, TheraJudge achieves strong agreement with clinician ratings, with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC = 0.87-0.95), surpassing supervised baselines and strong closed-source judges, particularly on critical dimensions such as Safety, Relevance, and Empathy. Acting on these evaluations, TheraAgent yields a +0.43 improvement in human-rated therapeutic quality (on a 5-point scale) under blind evaluation, with 96% clinician inter-rater reliability. Low-quality responses (

\leq 3

) improve by +2.45 points with a 94% recovery rate, demonstrating targeted correction of unsafe outputs. Overall, our results indicate that effective alignment of mental-health LLMs stems from acting on human-aligned evaluation, rather than relying solely on stronger generation. We release code at https://github.com/vis-nlp/TheraAlign.

Mizanur Rahman, Abeer Badawi, Elahe Rahimi +4

1York University, Ontario, Canada · 2Vector Institute, Ontario, Canada · 3Connected Minds, Ontario, Canada +1

Mental Health Counseling Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM-as-a-Judge Emotional Support Conversation Clinical Language Model Evaluation Text Generation

Jun 29, 2026eess.SY

A Systematic Approach to Multi-Agent AI from Advanced Regulatory Control Theory: Safe and Auditable LLM Operator Agents for Process Control

Recent literature shows that large language models (LLMs) are useful for general-purpose tasks yet perform poorly on specific domain ones. One reason is the difficulty of supplying narrow context to a general-purpose model and of bounding the task it is asked to perform. It is possible to hypothesise that a multi-agent reformulation under process-control principles offers a route to address those points, since control theory provides a discipline of decomposing a system into elements of contained scope, each defending one controlled variable, with conflicts resolved by structural priority: MIN/MAX selector networks for CV-CV switching and split-range (split-parallel) logic for MV-MV switching. The present work proposes such a reformulation, derived from Advanced Regulatory Control (ARC) theory. Each feedback loop in the ARC chain is mapped to one specialised LLM operator agent carrying the loop's control-theoretic context (controlled variable, setpoint, chain priority, selector kind). The chain's interaction logic (MIN/MAX selectors, override paths) is encapsulated as a single orchestrator agent. Two orchestrator variants are tested: a deterministic rule chain, and a Claude-based LLM orchestrator at a slower tier. The control principles limit each agent's task and inform how its limitations are handled. The multi-agent system inherits the safety property of the ARC chain: every constraint conflict is resolved deterministically by the orchestrator, regardless of the LLM output. Evaluated on a dairy-barn ventilation case over a 4-day mixed-season scenario, Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct operator agents running offline on a 24 GB consumer GPU at a 5-minute cadence produce auditable trajectories, each paired with an operator-voice rationale that supports a control campaign logbook.

Idelfonso B. R. Nogueira, Sigurd Skogestad

Department of Chemical Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, 7491, Norway

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Language Model-Based Control Feedback Control LLM Agent Safety

Jun 29, 2026cs.LG

Attractor States Emerge in Multi-Turn LLM Conversations

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in open-ended multi-agent settings, but the long-run dynamics of model--model interaction remain poorly understood. We study whether open-ended LLM discussions exhibit attractor-like behavior, i.e. topic-independent stable sets of behaviors which conversations settle into. Across 7 LLMs and 20 controversial topics, we compare self-play and mixed-play dyadic debates, tracking trajectories in representation space, discourse traits, and stances. We find self-play trajectories to be model-specific attractors that draw their conversation partners asymmetrically in mixed-play debates, influencing the other models' stylistic choices and behavior. For example, Claude Haiku is a strong attractor of other models in latent space, corresponding to other models taking on its traits like metacommentary, and models like GPT-4.1 nano are especially malleable. Our results suggest that open-ended LLM interactions are partially predictable from model-specific attractors, but shaped by structured and asymmetric partner influence. Overall, our analysis sheds some light on the complex behavior of open-ended multi-agent interaction, which we hope is helpful in designing, predicting, and monitoring autonomous agentic systems in the real world.

Ting-Wen Ko, Jonas Geiping

1Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems · 2ELLIS Institute · Tübingen +1

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

Jun 29, 2026cs.MA

MAS-Lab: A Specification-Driven Validation Framework for Reliable Multi-Agent Systems

The rapid emergence of LLM-based agentic frameworks has significantly reduced the cost of assembling multi-agent systems (MAS), enabling fast prototyping and exploration of agentic behaviors. However, systems built with current tooling remain ill-suited for reliable, evolvable, and production-grade deployment. In practice, MAS are often developed in an ad-hoc and imperative manner, with agent logic, orchestration, observability, and control tightly interwoven, little to no explicit system-level validation, and development workflows optimized for demonstrations rather than long-lived, governed operation. As a result, behavior observed during experimentation rarely constitutes reliable evidence of behavior in production. In this paper, we introduce MAS-Lab, a specification-driven framework for principled development and experimental validation of multi-agent systems properties. MAS-Lab is designed to transform MAS from collections of scripts into engineered distributed systems by separating semantic intent from operational concerns, making behavior and control explicit, supporting reproducible experimentation, and preserving continuity across lifecycle stages. MAS-Lab consists of three layers: a declarative, framework-agnostic agentic specification layer (Spec); a stateful MAS Operating System that provides execution and control primitives plugged-in by design (MAS-OS); and a set of lab overlays with integrated observability and evaluation tools (Labs). Together, these components enable intent-based validation, principled system evolution, and a seamless transition to production-grade MAS.

Jordan Augé, Giovanna Carofiglio, Giulio Grassi +1

Cisco Systems Paris, France

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Automated Software Testing Multi-Agent Orchestration Multi-Agent Systems

Jun 29, 2026physics.soc-ph

Collective cooperation without individual fidelity in LLM agents

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents in simulations of social systems, yet it remains unclear when their behavior can be interpreted as a faithful proxy for human decision-making. Here we test LLM agents against a direct empirical benchmark: a large-scale networked Prisoner's Dilemma experiment with human participants. Using the same interaction protocol, payoff structure, and network topologies, we compare nine open-weight LLMs with the human data. The selected model reproduces several macro-level features of cooperation dynamics, including the early decline and later stabilization of cooperation. This aggregate agreement, however, does not extend uniformly to finer levels of behavior. LLM populations underestimate individual-level heterogeneity and generate conditional cooperation patterns that differ from those observed in humans. Adding a fraction of random agents improves some aspects of micro-level agreement, but does not remove the mismatch in decision rules. These findings reveal a macro--micro dissociation in LLM-based social agents: collective outcomes can appear human-like even when the underlying behavioral distributions and mechanisms are not. They suggest that validating LLM agents as human surrogates requires comparisons across aggregate dynamics, individual heterogeneity, and context-dependent decision rules, rather than outcome-level agreement alone.

Henrique Ferraz de Arruda, Carlos Gracia Lázaro, Alberto Aleta +1

ARAID Foundation, Zaragoza, Spain. · Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain. · Universidad San Jorge (USJ), Zaragoza, Spain. +1

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Human Behavior Simulation LLM Agent Evaluation Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation

Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

Rehearsed Multi-Agent Live Product Demonstrations with Real-Time Voice Question Answering

Live product demonstrations are a recurring, high-cost activity in software organizations: a human presenter must select features, dispatch the corresponding interactions on a running application, narrate them coherently, and answer questions in real time. Existing automation addresses only fragments -- generalist browser agents target instruction-conditioned task completion, and demo-video tools produce fixed MP4 artifacts that cannot be questioned and silently break under interface drift. We propose Rhetor, a multi-agent system that takes a running web application and its source-code repository as input and produces a rehearsed live demonstration with segment-synchronized narration and real-time voice question answering. The architectural contributions are a cross-modal feature representation that merges UI exploration with source-code analysis into features tagged with discrete focus tiers, a grounded scripter constrained to UI elements observed during exploration and dispatched through multi-strategy semantic locators, a pre-presentation rehearsal loop with explicit convergence and graceful degradation to narration-only segments, and a runtime synchronization invariant that ties each browser action to the audio-end event of its narration segment. Across six pipeline sessions on four deployed applications -- including the public-domain whiteboard application Excalidraw -- the rehearser's internal locator-firing rate (sigma-bar) spans 0.31-1.00 over 147 scripted actions; on the substantial workload (53 actions, full tier differentiation), sigma-bar is approximately 0.92, and on the public-domain reference point the locator-repair step drives convergence to sigma-bar = 1.00 at iteration 2. We additionally define a benchmark protocol of ten metrics across six application categories that would establish, beyond the case study, whether each design choice contributes positively.

Rahul Khedar, Mayank Malhotra, Avinash Karn +2

PayPal AI

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Spoken QA Web Agents

Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Multi-Agentic System Leveraging Open-Source LLMs to Mitigate Disinformation Threats

In contemporary societies, the threat of disinformation has reached alarming levels, exacerbated by the proliferation of electronic communication, social media, and advancements in artificial intelligence. As a result, there is an urgent need to develop effective countermeasures to mitigate this menace. However, the sheer scale of the problem renders manual fact-checking and human-based verification inadequate, underscoring the necessity for automated methods to detect and debunk disinformation. This article proposes a novel approach based on a multi-agent system that emulates the decision-making processes of human annotators engaged in disinformation detection tasks. By incorporating a consensus mechanism, diversity in cognition and diversity in knowledge, and also hierarchical structure, inspired by human annotators' behavior, the proposed method achieves superior results compared to individual Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT 4 and GPT 3.5. The system leverages open models (e.g., LLaMA, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek and LLaMA-Nemotron) to ensure greater transparency. The evaluation of the proposed method encompasses datasets in languages with varying resource availability, including English (high-resource), Polish (medium-resource), Slovak (low-resource) and Bulgarian (low-resource). Experiments were conducted on tasks such as direct disinformation detection, identification of texts worthy of verification, and detection of texts containing verifiable factual claims.

Sebastian Kula, Martin Tamajka

Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies, Bratislava, Slovakia · West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fake News Detection Claim Verification Automated Fact-Checking

Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

SAGA: Scene-Aware, Goal-Evolving Agents for Long-Horizon Strategy Game Planning

Long-horizon strategic planning in complex strategy games requires coordinating tightly coupled decision domains, including technology, economy, diplomacy, and military, across hundreds of turns under imperfect information. Existing LLM-based agents face three challenges in this setting. They recover little relational structure, such as distance or threat, from raw coordinate observations. They serialize the entire growing game state into every prompt and plan all domains in a single output, so the context eventually overflows and urgent domains crowd out long-term ones. The only reward is a lagged final score, which provides no progress signal within or across games.<br/><br/>We present SAGA, an LLM multi-agent framework that addresses these challenges with three mechanisms: a Map-Semantic Scene Graph that renders typed entity relations as concise per-entity text, a Tool-Augmented Planner that retrieves state on demand and routes disjoint per-domain directives to specialist controllers, and a Dual-Horizon Feedback Loop that sets intermediate goals within a game and distills causal lessons across games. On CivRealm, a benchmark built on the strategy game FreeCiv, SAGA attains the highest mean final score among six methods, the statistically strongest gains on infrastructure, and a 27% reduction in output tokens. With cross-game evolution enabled, it reaches the highest score over five successive games.

Tianyu Jin, Shuo Chen, Yida Wang +6

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI)

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Game-Playing Agents Long-Horizon LLM Agents LLM Agent Planning Self-Evolving Agents

Jun 28, 2026cs.AI

Budgeted Act-or-Defer Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation with Local Reliability Bounds

Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review. We formulate this as budgeted act-or-defer decision making. At each round, the system maps the debate prefix to a low-dimensional state, computes a

k

-nearest-neighbor lower confidence bound on state-conditional correctness using calibration data, and acts only when the bound exceeds a user-specified reliability threshold. The certificate controls wrong actions through the decomposition

β= δ+ α+ \varepsilon_{\mathrm{act}}

, separating calibration failure, residual action risk, and representation gap. The guarantee is conditional, not distribution-free: it relies on a valid local bias envelope and an action-region representation-gap bound, and each assumption is paired with falsification-style diagnostics. Because the same absolute wrong-action budget has different meanings across tasks of different difficulty, we set budgets relative to each task's final-round error using training data only, and evaluate safety by normalized budget usage

\mathrm{WA}/β

. On six benchmarks against nine baselines, the method uses 9--12% of the pre-declared budget on activated datasets, reaching up to 84% automation and 96% acted-on accuracy; on stress-test datasets, it defers rather than forcing unreliable automation. Rather than relying on per-task post-hoc threshold search, the method prospectively converts a user-declared wrong-action budget into an auditable act-or-defer operating point before deployment, under explicitly stated assumptions.

Mengdie Flora Wang, Haochen Xie, Guanghui Wang +2

1AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, USA · General Motors (GM), USA

AI Agent Reliability Multi-Agent LLM Systems Selective Prediction LLM Decision-Making LLM Agent Reliability

Jun 28, 2026cs.AI

When LLMs Develop Languages: Symbolic Communication for Efficient Multi-Agent Reasoning

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves large language models (LLMs) on difficult reasoning tasks, but it often incurs long natural-language rationales that are poorly aligned with efficient machine reasoning. We propose Communicative Language Symbolism Routing (CLSR), a test-time framework in which multiple LLM agents autonomously invent, evolve, and share compact Language Symbolism Frameworks (LSFs), while a latent-free router adaptively selects and composes these languages per query to optimize the accuracy-token trade-off. Unlike prompt optimization that refines surface instructions, CLSR treats each LSF as a reusable symbolic protocol with compact symbols, usage rules, and a message-passing contract, and improves it through an evolutionary loop driven by correctness and token cost. At inference time, the router may invoke a single low-cost LSF call, ensemble multiple LSFs, or execute a multi-round LSF composition protocol on harder queries. Across challenging benchmarks, CLSR reduces latency-oriented generated token completion by

3\sim 6\times

compared to standard CoT while maintaining accuracy. We further derive an information-theoretic lower bound on token cost under arbitrary symbolism and show that, under an interpreter-realizability premise, multi-round LSF protocols conditionally subsume program-execution pipelines. Code is publicly available (https://github.com/pzqpzq/LSF_MDia).

Zhengqi Pei, Qingming Huang, Shuhui Wang

State Key Lab of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. · School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Efficient Language Model Reasoning LLM Routing Multi-Agent Communication

Jun 27, 2026cs.LG

The Contagion Tensor: A Framework for Measuring Output-Distribution Coupling in Multi-Agent LLM Systems -- and Auditing the Claims It Enables

We introduce the Contagion Tensor, a measurement framework for quantifying how large language model (LLM) output distributions couple across modalities, agents, and time steps. From the tensor we derive the Coupling Amplification Factor (CAF), a family of ratio-based metrics sharing the form CAF = E[T_condition] / E[T_baseline], providing unitless, baseline-referenced measurement with bootstrap confidence intervals. We instantiate CAF in four variants and evaluate the strongest in a complete 2x2x2 block-orthogonal simulation design with modality-specific ablation. The ablation reveals that an apparent image-condition super-linear effect (CAF = 1.40) collapses to sub-linear (CAF = 0.87) when the image perturbation module is disabled, a shift of -0.53 with zero effect on text conditions. We supplement with real-API experiments across two model families: DeepSeek-Chat (R=30) and GPT-4o-mini (R=15, real vision). Under uniform personas, text-only communication produces CAF approx 1.0 in both models. Diverse personas drive convergence (CAF = 0.88). A within-model comparison on GPT-4o-mini reveals: C3 (text) CAF = 1.02 vs. C5 (real vision, R=30) CAF = 1.72 [1.700, 1.733], delta = +0.70, validating the simulation's super-linear image-condition prediction. Of 11 conditions, 5 have been tested on real APIs and 6 remain unverified. Our contribution is two-layered: (1) a measurement instrument that makes output-distribution coupling quantitatively falsifiable; and (2) a transferable ablation protocol that any modular multi-agent simulator can adopt to distinguish genuine coupling from design artifacts.

Zewen Liu

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Auditing Multimodal Model Evaluation

Jun 26, 2026cs.MA

GBC: Gradient-Based Connections for Optimizing Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models (LLMs) provide a promising framework for solving complex tasks through role specialization and structured interaction. However, their performance is often limited by miscoordination and, more fundamentally, the lack of fine-grained credit assignment across agents. Existing approaches typically rely on coarse-grained feedback, making it difficult to identify which agents or interaction steps are responsible for errors. We propose Gradient-Based Connections (GBC), an approach for fine-grained attribution and optimization of multi-agent systems. GBC models a MAS as a computational graph and introduces gradient-based connection weights to quantify the influence of each agent's output on downstream agents at the token level. By constructing an attribution graph and propagating task-specific loss signals backward, our method enables precise identification of error sources and targeted prompt optimization. We further develop AgentChord, an efficient implementation that leverages prefix-based gradient computation. Experiments on MultiWOZ and τ-bench show that GBC improves multi-agent performance and outperforms strong single-agent and multi-agent baselines, and higher attribution quality is associated with greater optimization effectiveness. Code is available at: https://github.com/yxc-cyber/AgentChord.

Xiaocheng Yang, Abdulrahman Alrabah, Dilek Hakkani-Tür +1

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Gradient-Based Attribution Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent System Optimization Multi-Agent Coordination Multi-Agent Systems Prompt Optimization

Jun 26, 2026eess.SY

From Detection to Action: Using LLM Agents for Fault-Tolerant Control

We propose an agentic Large Language Model (LLM) framework for active Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) that transforms fault detection outputs into constraint-aware recovery actions grounded in plant-specific knowledge. The approach couples (i) a multi-agent workflow that decomposes operator duties into monitoring, planning, action synthesis, simulation, validation, and reprompting; (ii) a Digital Process Plant Twin (DPPT) that exposes plant data, models, and a simulation service for pre-execution testing; and (iii) a Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Graph RAG) layer built on the CPSMod ontology, which organizes plant knowledge (structure, function, hybrid dynamics, control context, and fault semantics) into a graph that supports relation-aware, multi-hop retrieval for the agents. Corrective actions are generated as minimal-risk state-machine recovery paths and corresponding discrete commands or continuous setpoint adaptations, then validated deterministically against interlocks, envelopes, and dynamic feasibility before any actuation. If no acceptable plan is found within a bounded time window, control is handed to a safety fallback. The framework is evaluated in simulation on two representative benchmarks: a discrete batch Mixing Module and a Continuous Stirred-Tank Reactor (CSTR) under closed-loop PID regulation. Results with lightweight LLMs (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini) show that semantically grounded agents can derive valid recovery decisions within latency budgets compatible with the respective process dynamics, demonstrating a practical pathway from detection to validated corrective action across both discrete and continuous FTC tasks.

Javal Vyas, Milapji Singh Gill, Artan Markaj +2

Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom · Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, 22043, Germany

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Language Model-Based Control Fault-Tolerant Control Feedback Control

Jun 26, 2026cs.MA

Is Lying an Emergent Behaviour in LLMs? Evidence from Gaslighting AI agents in a Sustainability Game

LLMs agents are increasingly used in multi-agent settings, yet their behaviour in sustainability games remains largely unexplored. This work investigates whether lying can emerge among LLM agents in a competitive sustainability game in which agents are informed that common resources can regenerate, although regeneration does not actually occur. We develop an agent-based model of a sustainability game in which agents manage industrial, military, and ecological resources, and interact through a network. LLM agents can observe neighbours' status, declare future attacks, receive permission to lie, and access reputation information, while rule-based agents provide an interpretable behavioural baseline. The results show that neighbour information strongly changes system dynamics, increasing attacks while improving biosphere retention and coexistence. Also, the presence of future declarations reduce extinction risk without suppressing conflict. Behaviourally, deception emerges even when agents are not explicitly allowed to lie, and explicit permission mainly increases bluffing and diversion rather than direct backstabbing. Finally, the presence of reputation memory and information about the current biosphere level reduces system ecological depletion. These findings suggest that deception can arise as an emergent behaviour in LLM-agent systems and that communication between LLM-agents could support sustainability while dealing with risk.

Subhendu Bhandary, Federico Carucci, Christos Charalambous +6

Chair for Network Dynamics, Institute of Theoretical Physics, TUD Dresden University of Technology, 01062 Dresden, Germany · School of Industrial Engineering, LIUC – Università Cattaneo, Castellanza, Italy · Department of Economics, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus +6

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Deception in Language Models LLM Agent Evaluation

Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

COOPA: A Modular LLM Agent Architecture for Operations Research Problems

Operations Research (OR) provides a rigorous framework for high-stakes decision-making, but effective OR modeling requires substantial domain knowledge, mathematical abstraction, and solver expertise. Recent LLM-based systems automate parts of this pipeline, yet remain limited by low accuracy on complex problems, opaque outputs, and narrow solver support. We propose COOPA (COoperative OPerations Agent), a modular LLM-agent architecture for interpretable and scalable OR decision support. It combines three components: iterative confidence-based modeling, which generates multiple candidate formulations, self-evaluates them across modeling dimensions, and selects one using a max-min confidence criterion; element-level provenance and confidence explanations, which link variables, parameters, constraints, and objectives to quoted source text and provide an audit trail for human verification; and multi-solver routing to specialized optimizer agents for different OR problem classes. Across three OR benchmarks, eight LLM backbones, and four baselines under identical conditions, COOPA achieves the best macro-average accuracy on six of eight backbones and improves over the strongest baseline by up to 6.7 percentage points. A within-system ablation isolates the contribution of iterative confidence-based modeling, while additional analyses and case studies illustrate the value of source traceability and multi-solver dispatch.

Chuanhao Li, Xiaoan Xu, Dirk Bergemann +3

1Tsinghua University · 2Duke University · 3Yale University

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Orchestration Explainable Artificial Intelligence Natural Language to Optimization Modeling

Jun 25, 2026cs.CR

Tool Use Enables Undetectable Steganography in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Increasingly autonomous agentic AI systems pose novel multi-agent risks, such as secret collusion via covert communication channels. The natural defence to these collusion attempts is to monitor plain-text communication, but the efficacy of monitors has been called into doubt by increasingly sophisticated model steganography; indeed, some theoretical schemes have been proposed that are information-theoretically or computationally indistinguishable from good-faith plain-text communication. In this paper, we demonstrate that the complexity of these schemes is no longer a safety barrier, as agentic coding models can already produce undetectable stegosystems when given realistic tool usage, such as code execution or accessing research papers through web searches. Agents also adapt when key ingredients are missing, for example, by adding model-sampling components or implementing related keyed coding schemes. We then frame tacit steganographic coordination between agents as a Schelling-point problem and introduce coordination metrics for estimating when two agents are likely to select compatible schemes without explicit prior agreement. Our results suggest a shift in the threat model for covert communication between AI agents, where the main barrier is no longer whether frontier agents can understand and implement sophisticated stegosystems, but coordination: whether independently acting agents can converge on compatible schemes, keys, and parameters. We find substantial convergence on broad scheme families but limited strict one-shot coordination, suggesting that shared artefacts, repeated interaction, and tool-mediated search are the settings where covert communication risks are most acute. Overall, our findings provide empirical grounding for the recent strategic confinement hypothesis, which assumes that capable agents can construct covert channels that survive monitoring.

Jimmy Laurence Rippin, Simon C. Marshall, David Demitri Africa +1

Oxford University · Artificial Intelligence Security Institute (AISI)

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination LLM Agent Security

Jun 25, 2026cs.MA

QueenBee Planner: Skill-Evolving Communication Topologies for Token-Efficient LLM Multi-Agent Systems

Large language model (LLM) multi-agent systems increasingly depend not only on how individual agents reason, but also on how agents are connected. This paper introduces QueenBee Planner, a framework that treats inter-agent communication topology as a retrievable and self-improving design skill. A pool of worker agents, the task adapter, and the scoring function are frozen; only an outer LLM planner learns to generate temporal communication DAGs specifying who sends information to whom, in which round, who merges messages, and who emits the final answer. Execution traces are distilled into evidence-backed design rules with three actions: \emph{Preserve}, \emph{Modify}, and \emph{Avoid}. To prevent self-evolution from turning lucky runs or plausible but false explanations into policy, QueenBee uses held-out acceptance gates, variance-aware credit, motif-level attribution, transfer trust, insight falsification, and structural deduplication. We evaluate the method on Count-Frequency aggregation and Silo-Bench-style distributed coordination tasks. With fixed workers, self-evolved graph generation produces communication structures that improve over fixed topologies and cold generation. In the CF fulltest setting, the best generated graph reduces RMSE from 12.53 for the strongest fixed topology to 7.87 while also reducing messages, model calls, and token cost; Silo-style results show the same direction of improvement over cold and fixed-topology baselines. These results suggest that multi-agent systems can learn reusable architectural design knowledge rather than merely memorizing task answers.

Congjia Tian, Yuhang Yao, Jiaming Cui

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA · Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent System Optimization LLM Agent Skill Learning Multi-Agent Communication