Benefits and Limitations of Communication in Multi-Agent Reasoning

Jul 16, 2026

A new theoretical framework analyzes the expressivity of multi-agent systems for tasks such as state tracking, recall, and k-hop reasoning. The study derives bounds on the number of agents, communication structure, and achievable speedups, identifying when communication is beneficial and clarifying tradeoffs between agent count and bandwidth. Experiments with pretrained LLMs on synthetic benchmarks empirically confirm the predicted tradeoffs.

Why it matters: This work provides foundational guidance for designing scalable multi-agent reasoning systems by clarifying the roles and limitations of communication.

Full story at: arXiv Multiagent Systems ↗