Multi-Agent Teams Hold Experts Back

Understand

Multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly deployed as autonomous collaborators, where agents interact freely rather than execute fixed, pre-specified workflows.

• In such settings, effective coordination cannot be fully designed in advance and must instead emerge through interaction.
• However, most prior work enforces coordination through fixed roles, workflows, or aggregation rules, leaving open the question of how well self-organizing teams perform when coordination is unconstrained.
• Drawing on organizational psychology, we study whether self-organizing LLM teams achieve strong synergy, where team performance matches or exceeds the best individual member.