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Main Authors: Yang, Xu, Nie, Lunyiu, Chandra, Ethan, Gannutin, Stanislav, Lin, Fangru, Chaudhuri, Swarat
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00953
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author Yang, Xu
Nie, Lunyiu
Chandra, Ethan
Gannutin, Stanislav
Lin, Fangru
Chaudhuri, Swarat
author_facet Yang, Xu
Nie, Lunyiu
Chandra, Ethan
Gannutin, Stanislav
Lin, Fangru
Chaudhuri, Swarat
contents Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems offer a way to decompose complex tasks, such as coding, through parallelization and context isolation. However, adding agents in practice introduces inter-agent communication overhead, which incurs extra cost and can sometimes offset the efficiency gains. We formalize multi-agent orchestration as a graph partitioning problem that captures the communication-to-computation trade-off: task decomposition can shorten critical-path computation, but cross-agent dependencies require costly context transfer. We instantiate this view in repository-level software engineering and present Cohesion-aware Coder (Co-Coder), which builds dependency graphs from static analysis, isolates structural hub files, partitions the graph via community detection, and executes the partition with a dependency-aware scheduler. Across 28 real-world tasks on DevEval and CodeProjectEval, Co-Coder advances the Pareto-frontier over sequential and file-based parallel baselines as well as Claude Code with Agent Teams, lifting pass rate by up to 14.0%, achieving up to a 2.10x wall-clock speedup, and reducing API cost by up to 35%, with the largest gains on the most dependency-dense projects. Co-coder demonstrates how cohesion-aware orchestration can make parallel coding agents both theoretically grounded and practically efficient, suggesting a broader design principle for multi-agent systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Parallelism Pays Off: Cohesion-Aware Task Partitioning for Multi-Agent Coding
Yang, Xu
Nie, Lunyiu
Chandra, Ethan
Gannutin, Stanislav
Lin, Fangru
Chaudhuri, Swarat
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems offer a way to decompose complex tasks, such as coding, through parallelization and context isolation. However, adding agents in practice introduces inter-agent communication overhead, which incurs extra cost and can sometimes offset the efficiency gains. We formalize multi-agent orchestration as a graph partitioning problem that captures the communication-to-computation trade-off: task decomposition can shorten critical-path computation, but cross-agent dependencies require costly context transfer. We instantiate this view in repository-level software engineering and present Cohesion-aware Coder (Co-Coder), which builds dependency graphs from static analysis, isolates structural hub files, partitions the graph via community detection, and executes the partition with a dependency-aware scheduler. Across 28 real-world tasks on DevEval and CodeProjectEval, Co-Coder advances the Pareto-frontier over sequential and file-based parallel baselines as well as Claude Code with Agent Teams, lifting pass rate by up to 14.0%, achieving up to a 2.10x wall-clock speedup, and reducing API cost by up to 35%, with the largest gains on the most dependency-dense projects. Co-coder demonstrates how cohesion-aware orchestration can make parallel coding agents both theoretically grounded and practically efficient, suggesting a broader design principle for multi-agent systems.
title When Parallelism Pays Off: Cohesion-Aware Task Partitioning for Multi-Agent Coding
topic Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00953