Faithful, Not Corrective: Model Capability Governs Message-Format Effects in Multi-Hop Agent Relays

When LLM agents hand information to one another, does the message format matter? Two literatures disagree: format-optimization work reports that structured messages cut cost without hurting accuracy, while format-restriction studies find that imposing structure degrades generation. Neither line has measured what happens when messages traverse multiple hops, where copy fidelity, rather than one-shot generation quality, dominates. We introduce a controlled relay testbed in which briefs of twelve programmatic atomic facts are re-encoded hop by hop in five formats (free natural language, precision-instructed NL, JSON, triples, key-value) over six hops, scored against programmatic ground truth...

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