Competence-Aware Orchestration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2610.13144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing complex reasoning through role specialization and collaboration, yet a key challenge remains: how can collaboration be adapted to a backbone's competence on the current query? This problem matters because more collaboration is not always better--richer coordination may help on difficult cases, but it also incurs additional token cost and redundant interactions. We propose a two-stage competence-aware framework for automatic MAS orchestration. It first models the LLM backbone's task-conditioned competence for the current query, and then uses this signal to adapt role activation and the communication graph. Across six benchmarks, our method achieves an average score of 93.81%. Experiments with six LLM backbones of varying competence levels further show that our method adjusts collaboration according to the inferred competence: for higher-competence backbones, it improves average accuracy from 87.22 to 89.97 while reducing token cost by 36.26%; for lower-competence backbones, it yields a further average gain of 4.58 points over existing methods. The same trend also holds on unseen backbones.

Related

• ProgRouter: Online Progress-Guided Orchestration for Multi-Agent LLM Workflows under Quality-Cost Tradeoffs
• DHCG: Dynamic Construction of Hierarchical Collaboration Graphs for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Reasoning
• Token-Efficient Multi-Agent Collaboration via System One-Guided Computational Division of Labor
• Learning What to Retain: Gated-Memory Routing for Efficient Collaboration in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-10-12