ResearchResearch paperReinforcement Learning · Agents & Tool Use · Safety & Alignment1 source · Oct 21, 2026

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Contrastive Attribution Topology Search for Multi-Agent Systems

We propose Contrastive Attribution Topology Search (CATS), which searches for compact teams within a fixed supergraph of specialized agents.

Key points

  • An LLM multi-agent system (MAS) is only as good as the agents it chooses to trust: its accuracy and cost hinge on its topology, meaning which agents are included and how they communicate.
  • An LLM attributer compares execution traces across candidate topologies and assigns credit to individual agents.
  • With small open-weight models and matched candidate evaluations, CATS improves mean accuracy on BigCodeBench by 5.3 percentage points over score-only heuristic search while using 54% fewer deployment tokens.
  • Per-agent credit thus supports both team optimization and the pruning of potentially harmful agents.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Credit Where Credit Is Due: Contrastive Attribution Topology Search for Multi-Agent Systems
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 21, 06:46 AM
    We propose Contrastive Attribution Topology Search (CATS), which searches for compact teams within a fixed supergraph of specialized agents.
    An LLM multi-agent system (MAS) is only as good as the agents it chooses to trust: its accuracy and cost hinge on its topology, meaning which agents are included and how they communicate.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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