Pith Number

pith:IO25R27P

pith:2026:IO25R27PGJ2BRQSC2ZRSCVUKWQ

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

When Does Multi-Agent Collaboration Help? An Entropy Perspective

Ningxin Su, Sijia Chen, Yuxuan Zhao

Single-agent setups outperform multi-agent LLM collaboration in 43 percent of cases because entropy patterns stabilize after the first round.

arxiv:2602.04234 v6 · 2026-02-04 · cs.MA

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{IO25R27PGJ2BRQSC2ZRSCVUKWQ}

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Record completeness

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

a single agent outperforms MAS in approximately 43.3% of cases, and that entropy dynamics are largely determined during the first round of interaction... we introduce a simple yet effective algorithm, the Entropy Judger, to select solutions from MAS's pass@k results, leading to consistent accuracy improvements across all MAS configurations and tasks.

C2weakest assumption

That the 245 entropy features extracted at token, agent, and round levels are sufficient to capture the causal drivers of MAS success or failure without significant confounding from model-specific tokenization or prompt formatting choices.

C3one line summary

Entropy patterns show single LLMs often outperform multi-agent groups, first-round dynamics dominate, and an entropy judger improves solution selection across benchmarks.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-05T01:15:19.704519Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

43b5d8ebef327418c242d66321568ab4030d112c0905bcaa1d9c6dee400ebc23

Aliases

arxiv: 2602.04234 · arxiv_version: 2602.04234v6 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.04234 · pith_short_12: IO25R27PGJ2B · pith_short_16: IO25R27PGJ2BRQSC · pith_short_8: IO25R27P

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/IO25R27PGJ2BRQSC2ZRSCVUKWQ \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 43b5d8ebef327418c242d66321568ab4030d112c0905bcaa1d9c6dee400ebc23

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "f97f50f3f927448c1b51e7003903b992e1b7e2ad965df5ac2b5b0bc6d19ed775",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.MA",
    "submitted_at": "2026-02-04T05:53:21Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "16270a1613a3cd5d62be162b2353fd1c34973ee1464ce826db02fa5faaa802f4"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2602.04234",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 6
  }
}