# DIANOIA: Diagnostic Decomposition and Joint Optimization for Multi-Agent Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08586/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 11 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- 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, 11 of 11)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01680/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06322/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Frontiers in LLM Reasoning: Inference Scaling, Learning to Reason, and Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09037/) (2025)
- [VitaBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents with Versatile Interactive Tasks in Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26490/) (2025)
- [Improving LLM Reasoning through Scaling Inference Computation with Collaborative Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05318/) (2024)
- [AgentCoder: Multi-Agent-based Code Generation with Iterative Testing and Optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13010/) (2023)
- [Two Heads are Better Than One: Test-time Scaling of Multi-agent Collaborative Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09772/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-Agent Cooperative Decision-Making: Scenarios, Approaches, Challenges and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13415/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent LLM systems consistently outperform single-agent baselines, yet practitioners still cannot predict which design works for a new task or diagnose why one fails. We argue this gap persists largely because the field lacks a diagnostic framework with measurable primitives and testable predictions. We introduce DIANOIA, a three-channel decomposition of multi-agent reasoning gain into coverage, fidelity, and synthesis, each of which is empirically measurable. From this decomposition, we derive a diagnostic protocol that identifies the bottleneck channels for any given task. We instantiate the protocol as a multi-agent system whose three components mirror the channels: role-diverse proposers for coverage, execution-grounded verification for fidelity, and iterative synthesis. On GSM8K, AIME-2025, MBPP, and BFCL-SP, our method outperforms strong multi-agent baselines under matched token budgets, dominating the Pareto frontier on MBPP at ~5× token savings and reaching +4.6pp at matched cost. On every benchmark, the protocol picks the right bottleneck channels; the system we built around it leads across models. We release code, adapters, diagnostic metrics, and a Claude Code skill at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DIANOIA4MAS. DIANOIA reframes multi-agent design as channel-aware resource allocation: diagnose which channel is the bottleneck for your task, then invest tokens accordingly.