# Cost-Effective Communication: An Auction-based Method for Language Agent Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13193 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13193/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 23 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of PPO in Cooperative, Multi-Agent Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01955/) (2021)
- [Program Induction by Rationale Generation : Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04146/) (2017)
- [Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06676/) (2016)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [Solving General Arithmetic Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01413/) (2016)
- [A Dynamic LLM-Powered Agent Network for Task-Oriented Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02170/) (2023)
- [Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06782/) (2024)
- [Learning Attentional Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07733/) (2018)
- [Improving Multi-Agent Debate with Sparse Communication Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11776/) (2024)
- [CogVLA: Cognition-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Model via Instruction-Driven Routing & Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21046/) (2025)
- [LION-FS: Fast & Slow Video-Language Thinker as Online Video Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03663/) (2025)
- [GAM-Agent: Game-Theoretic and Uncertainty-Aware Collaboration for Complex Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23399/) (2025)
- [Learning Individually Inferred Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06455/) (2020)
- [MAT-Agent: Adaptive Multi-Agent Training Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17845/) (2025)
- [DrDiff: Dynamic Routing Diffusion with Hierarchical Attention for Breaking the Efficiency-Quality Trade-off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02785/) (2025)
- [OSC: Cognitive Orchestration through Dynamic Knowledge Alignment in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04876/) (2025)
- [Enhancing the General Agent Capabilities of Low-Parameter LLMs through Tuning and Multi-Branch Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19962/) (2024)
- [MACCA: Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Causal Credit Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03644/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [LLM-CAS: Dynamic Neuron Perturbation for Real-Time Hallucination Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18623/) (2025)
- [FlashVLM: Text-Guided Visual Token Selection for Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20561/) (2025)
- [Group Editing: Edit Multiple Images in One Go](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22883/) (2026)
- [STORM: Search-Guided Generative World Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18477/) (2025)
- [MoE-DiffuSeq: Enhancing Long-Document Diffusion Models with Sparse Attention and Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20604/) (2025)
- [InstanceAnimator: Multi-Instance Sketch Video Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25357/) (2026)
- [ATOM: Instantiating Budget-Controllable Multi-Agent Collaboration via Nucleus-Electron Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26178/) (2026)
- [Error-Aware Reverse Auction Mechanism for Large Language Model Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12719/) (2026)
- [SirenPose: Dynamic Scene Reconstruction via Geometric Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20531/) (2025)
- [SA-DiffuSeq: Addressing Computational and Scalability Challenges in Long-Document Generation with Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20724/) (2025)
- [Towards Efficient Post-Training via Fourier-Driven Adapter Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22378/) (2025)
- [Self-Rewarded Multimodal Coherent Reasoning Across Diverse Visual Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22545/) (2025)
- [DNF: Dual-Layer Nested Fingerprinting for Large Language Model Intellectual Property Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08223/) (2026)
- [A Scalable Curiosity-Driven Game-Theoretic Framework for Long-Tail Multi-Label Learning in Data Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15330/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models (LLMs) often suffer from inefficient "free-for-all" communication, leading to exponential token costs and low signal-to-noise ratios that hinder their practical deployment. We challenge the notion that more communication is always beneficial, hypothesizing instead that the core issue is the absence of resource rationality. We argue that "free" communication, by ignoring the principle of scarcity, inherently breeds inefficiency and unnecessary expenses. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Auction-based Language Agent (DALA), a novel framework that treats communication bandwidth as a scarce and tradable resource. Specifically, our DALA regards inter-agent communication as a centralized auction, where agents learn to bid for the opportunity to speak based on the predicted value density of their messages. Thus, our DALA intrinsically encourages agents to produce concise, informative messages while filtering out low-value communication. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our economically-driven DALA achieves new state-of-the-art performance across seven challenging reasoning benchmarks, including 84.32% on MMLU and a 91.21% pass@1 rate on HumanEval. Note that this is accomplished with remarkable efficiency, i.e., our DALA uses only 6.25 million tokens, a fraction of the resources consumed by current state-of-the-art methods on GSM8K. Further analysis reveals that our DALA cultivates the emergent skill of strategic silence, effectively adapting its communication strategies from verbosity to silence in a dynamical manner via resource constraints. Our code and updates are available at https://github.com/waltstephen/Cost-Effective-Communication.