Must-read paper on the effectiveness of multi-agent systems and persistent memory.
We have recently seen many viral examples of multi-agent systems scaled via persistent memory.
This work takes a closer look.
They test one three-tier chain-of-agents system.
Splitting long-context work across agents cuts peak KV cache to 14.3 MiB per query, against about 35 MiB for single-pass and RAG baselines.
The persistent trace-recall tier adds 0.368 MiB of peak cache and changes accuracy by +0.015, with a confidence interval that crosses zero.
The authors explain why.
Single-question benchmarks give each item its own evidence and score it independently, so stored traces have nothing useful to recall.
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