Team-of-5 Claude agents matches Best-of-33 in new test-time communication paper
DimitrisPapail · x · 2026-09-21
Dimitris Papail, Jon Ghoh and collaborators released a new paper arguing test-time communication may be the next axis for scaling capabilities, asking: when is Team-of-N better than Best-of-N?
Setup: N identical agents work on the same task with no prescribed roles, sharing only a log file and told to "collaborate". Across three research-style tasks, communicating teams beat independent agents:
- ARC-AGI-3: a team of 5 sonnet-4.6 agents matches Best-of-33 and solves a game 65% of the time that no single agent cracked in 64 tries;
- Polyomino packing: teams also substantially outperform.
The authors cite the Hugging Face incident: agents will exploit any communication channel they can find, making it worth studying when communication makes a group more capable than the same agents working alone.
Related event: Test-Time Communication: Team-of-5 Agents Matches Best-of-33(25 posts)→
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