Single-Agent LLMs Outperform Multi-Agent Systems on Multi-Hop Reasoning Under Equal Thinking Token Budgets
Recent work reports strong performance from multi-agent LLM systems (MAS), but these gains are often confounded by increased test-time computation. When computation is normalized, single-agent systems (SAS) can match or outperform MAS, yet the theoretical basis and evaluation methodology behind this comparison remain unclear. We present an information-theoretic argument, grounded in the Data Processing Inequality, suggesting that under a fixed reasoning-token budget and with perfect context utilization, single-agent systems are more information-efficient. This perspective further predicts that multi-agent systems become competitive when a single agent's effective context utilization is de...
| Authors | Dat Tran, Douwe Kiela |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.