The Interaction Tax: When Communication Erases Diversity in Multi-Agent Teams
Does multi-agent LLM interaction help or hurt? Some work reports gains from debate (Du et al., 2024), critique loops (Chen et al., 2025), and mixture-of-agents synthesis (Wang et al., 2025), while other work finds that interaction adds cost without improving quality under equal budgets (Tran & Kiela, 2026; Xu et al., 2026; Jarrett et al., 2025), or that independent sampling already captures multi-agent gains (Li et al., 2024). We argue this contradiction partly reflects a missing distinction, because not all multi-agent communication is equal. Different model families find structurally different solutions, but when agents read each other's complete outputs, their proposals converge within...
| Authors | Summer Eunhyung Ann, Haokun Liu, Chenhao Tan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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