Getting Up to Speed on Multi-Agent Systems, Part 3: Wave 1 (Can Agents Coordinate At All?)

Wave 1 is the cluster of papers from 2023 that people actually cite. When someone says “I read the multi-agent papers,” they usually mean these. In this post I’m going to walk through the canonical five, explain what each one actually builds, and show where they agree and where they quietly disagree with each other. Getting Up to Speed on MAS Part 1. The LandscapePart 2. The VocabularyPart 3. Wave 1: Can Agents Coordinate At All? (you are here) Part 4. Wave 2: Why It Breaks (publishes April 27) Part 5. Debate, State, and Coordination (publishes April 28) Part 6. Verification Patterns (publishes April 29) Part 7. Benchmarks and What They Miss (publishes April 30) Part 8. Open Questions (publishes May 1) CAMEL: Two Agents Role-Playing CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration arXiv 2303.17760 · NeurIPS 2023 Two LLMs role-play until the task is done. Core bet: Prompt constraints keep agents on task 2 agents role-play inception prompting AI User (instructor) and AI Assistant in a…