When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck Perspective
LLM powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a promising paradigm for complex tasks. However, their advantages over single-agent systems (SAS) remain unclear, with performance varying inconsistently across settings. Here, we provide an information bottleneck perspective on elucidating the differences between MAS and SAS. Specifically, our key observation is that a SAS accumulates its full reasoning trace in one shared context, while a MAS uses isolated local contexts connected by bounded relay messages. We show that, under infinite relay bandwidth, any SAS can be simulated by a MAS th
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- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 59%AgentCore-8B →
“Fuzzy title match (0.73): “When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck ” ≈ “AgentCore-8B””
- PossiblePossibly related (embedding) · 53%Why sandboxing your agent is not enough →
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 87%SWE-agent/SWE-agent →
“Fuzzy title match (0.94): “When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck ” ≈ “SWE-agent/SWE-agent””
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 87%zhayujie/CowAgent →
“Fuzzy title match (0.94): “When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck ” ≈ “zhayujie/CowAgent””
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 66%open-multi-agent/open-multi-agent →
“Fuzzy title match (0.78): “When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck ” ≈ “open-multi-agent/open-multi-agent””
- FuzzyOverlapping authors or contributors · 62%sgl-project/sglang →
“Shared author/contributor keys: zhou”
- FuzzySimilar title/name (fuzzy) · 59%iflytek/astron-agent →
“Fuzzy title match (0.73): “When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck ” ≈ “iflytek/astron-agent””
- LinkedLinked via arxiv author · 85%Wendi Yu →
“When Do Multi-Agent Systems Help? An Information Bottleneck Perspective”