Attention Tax, Handoff Tax: A Stylised Model of When Multi-Agent LLM Systems Help

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.06069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on multi-agent LLM systems reaches sharply different conclusions: some results show that a single agent with the same information and compute should dominate a delegated system, others that multi-agent gains grow with task depth. We argue that much of the disagreement comes from modelling different bottlenecks, and introduce a stylised reliability model built around two trade-offs. Decomposition reduces the burden of long contexts but