MARS: Multi-Specialist LLM Relay System for Competitive Programming

Large Language Models excel at code generation, yet competitive programming exposes a persistent failure mode: existing multi-agent pipelines distribute work over generic planner, coder, and debugger roles and delegate the choice of algorithmic technique to the backbone alone. We present MARS (Multi-Agent Relay of Specialized LLMs), a prompt-only framework in which each agent is a topic specialist---dynamic programming, graphs, strings, geometry, and so on---grounded by retrieval-augmented generation over an algorithm-theory corpus. Given a problem, retrieval selects a small team of relevant specialists; a starter writes an initial C++17 solution, and each subsequent turn runs the candidate against public examples in a sandbox, lets the active specialist keep, repair, or hand off the draft, and forwards a structured packet to the next specialist. A single infrastructure-fixer pass normalizes boilerplate at the end. On the CodeContests test split with Gemma 4, MARS reaches 0.624 ± 0.006 pass rate at 2.3 recorded pipeline stages per task (+14.4 percentage points over direct prompting), closing most of the gap to CodeSIM (0.731) at 3.3× lower wall-clock cost and substantially smaller variance in per-task token spend. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/fckand/mars.