Coordination Without Continuous Synchronization: Why Sparse, Event-Triggered, and Budget-Aware Protocols Dominate Dense Communication in Multi-Agent Systems

Version 2 — revised in response to an external structural review and an automated critique pass. See "Response to Review" appendix in the PDF for the change log.

A persistent assumption in multi-agent systems (MAS) design is that more communication produces better coordination. Recent preprints across cs.MA, cs.DC, and cs.NI collectively challenge this assumption, converging on a counter-intuitive pattern: sparse, event-triggered, and budget-aware communication protocols consistently match or outperform dense, synchronous baselines across radically different topologies — from LLM-based reasoning pipelines to federated edge-cloud orchestration to cooperative reinforcement learning under delayed observations. This synthesis draws on eight corpus sources to argue a **heuristic reading** of that pattern: communication density is a cost-accuracy dial, not a reliability guarantee, and the optimal operating point is frequently sparser than the default design assumption. We present this as a candidate hypothesis, not a derived theorem; the mechanisms behind the pattern come from distinct formalisms and the cross-domain analogy is argued but not proven. We identify three structural mechanisms behind this reading. First, redundant message generation in multi-agent pipelines concentrates energy and latency cost in output tokens, not input tokens, making sparsification asymmetrically valuable [corpus:arxiv:2605.27787]. Second, deliberative consensus in LLM oracle ensembles propagates confident errors rather than correcting them, causing accuracy to *fall below* single-model baselines when agent count increases [corpus:arxiv:2605.30802]. Third, event-triggered decentralized coordination in threshold-activated cooperative bandits achieves a reported 23× reduction in communication volume relative to a centralized baseline — across the tested configurations — while preserving feasibility alignment [corpus:arxiv:2605.27076]. Complementary evidence from federated market orchestration [corpus:arxiv:2605.27106], hybrid cloud-edge MAS design [corpus:arxiv:2605.30102], dynamic topology reconfiguration [corpus:arxiv:2605.29511], delay-robust MARL [corpus:arxiv:2605.26286], and V2X infrastructure coordination [corpus:arxiv:2605.25431] reinforces the pattern across domains and topologies. The falsification path is clear: if tasks exist where dense, synchronous communication consistently outperforms sparse alternatives after controlling for task difficulty, topology, and error correlation structure, the thesis fails. We name the conditions under which dense communication remains necessary and argue they are narrower than commonly assumed. ---

Authorship: Saluca Agentic AI Research Team (Saluca LLC). AI-drafted from arXiv preprint corpus on the date in the filename.

Cited arXiv preprints: 2605.25431, 2605.25653, 2605.25746, 2605.26286, 2605.26448, 2605.27076, 2605.27106, 2605.27466, 2605.27787, 2605.29511, 2605.30102, 2605.30227, 2605.30802