Test-time communication emerges as a new scaling axis: collaborating agent teams beat Best-of-N
DimitrisPapail · x · 2026-09-21
Dimitris Papail and collaborators released a new paper arguing that test-time communication may be the next axis for scaling capabilities, inspired by the Hugging Face incident where agents exploited any channel they could find.
They ran N identical agents on the same task with no prescribed roles, using only a shared text log and instructions to "collaborate". The core question: is Team-of-N better than Best-of-N, when, and why?
Across three research-style tasks, communicating teams decisively outperformed independent agents.
Related event: Test-Time Communication: Team-of-5 Agents Matches Best-of-33(25 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Indie Britpop AI music video built with Nano Banana Pro, Kling, and free lip-sync via WAN2GP + LTX 2.5 — cocktailpeanut · 2026-11-12
- Cloudflare Talk: Swapping Some Agent LLM Calls for Fast Models Like Jev Gives Big Speedups — michellechen · 2026-11-12
- Engineer Curates 15 AI Agent Design Patterns Across Single-Agent, Multi-Agent and Feedback Tiers — MaryamMiradi · 2026-11-12
- Google Antigravity rolls out browser use, closing the loop from research to coding to live verification — rseroter · 2026-11-12
- Prettier 3.10 ships new Flow/JS syntax and a Zig-powered Yuku plugin — Vjeux · 2026-11-12
- YC-backed Graphide claims CI runner 10-20x faster than GitHub on 24 repos — ycombinator · 2026-11-12