Can Dependencies Induced by LLM-Agent Workflows Be Trusted?

Yu Yao, Yiliao Song, Yian Xie, Mengdan Fan, Mingyu Guo, Tongliang Liu

Keywords: Multi-LLM-Agent System

TL;DR: This paper presents a dynamic framework that enables reliable execution under violated conditional independence assumptions.

Abstract:

LLM-agent systems often decompose high-level objectives into subtask dependency graphs, assuming that each subtask’s output is reliable and conditionally independent of others given its parent responses.
However, this assumption frequently breaks during execution, as ground-truth responses are inaccessible, leading to inter-agent misalignment—failures caused by inconsistencies and coordination breakdowns among agents.
To address this, we propose SeqCV, a dynamic framework for reliable execution under violated conditional independence.
SeqCV executes subtasks sequentially, each conditioned on all prior verified responses, and performs consistency checks immediately after agents generate short token sequences.
At each checkpoint, a token sequence is accepted only if it represents shared knowledge consistently supported across diverse LLM models; otherwise, it is discarded, triggering recursive subtask decomposition for finer-grained reasoning.
Despite its sequential nature, SeqCV avoids repeated corrections on the same misalignment and achieves higher effective throughput than parallel pipelines.
Across multiple reasoning and coordination tasks, SeqCV improves accuracy by up to 30\% over existing LLM-agent systems.
Code is available at https://github.com/tmllab/2025_NeurIPS_SeqCV.

Primary Area: Applications (e.g., vision, language, speech and audio, Creative AI)

Submission Number: 9779