Long Live the Librarian! A Persistent Search Sub-Agent for Energy-Efficient Multi-Agent Software Engineering Systems
Multi-agent systems (MAS) have substantially advanced autonomous software engineering (SWE), but their growing inference energy demands raise sustainability concerns. In this paper, we demonstrate that this cost is concentrated in an overlooked source: redundant output tokens generated across agents. Two empirical findings ground this claim. First, our per-token energy attribution for MAS reveals a sharp asymmetry: an output token consumes 30 to 1,000 times more energy than an input or cached token. Second, MAS inflate per-episode output because agents repeatedly re-explore overlapping repository regions. To address this inefficiency, we propose Librarian, a persistent search sub-agent th...
| Authors | Seunghyuk Cho, Sunghyun Choi, Jaeseung Heo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 27 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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