Coordination as an Architectural Layer for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Key points

• LLM-based multi-agent systems show high failure rates in real operating environments, ranging from 41 to 87 percent, because of coordination failures such as ambiguity and misalignment.
• There is no principled framework that maps specific coordination configurations to predictable failure signatures, which hinders proactive system design.
• Prior empirical comparisons of multi-agent structures often conflate structural effects with increased information access, making it hard to isolate the true structural impact.
• The paper proposes treating coordination as a composable architectural layer distinct from agent logic and information access, and it minimally specifies this layer with seven elements, including communication topology and aggregation rules.
• It designs and implements an information-control experimental methodology that strictly fixes the LLM, tool stack, prompt templates, and output caps while varying only the coordination layer.
• Using a prediction-market testbed, Polymarket, it evaluates and diagnoses structural effects on prediction reliability and resolution with objective real-world outcomes and rigorous proper scoring rules, including the Brier score and Murphy decomposition.

Paper links

External research summaries. These are not HDATF publications or measured product results.