Chain-of-Agents Planner: Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration for Long-Horizon Decision Making

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks through multi-agent collaboration. However, existing approaches primarily focus on open-ended reasoning or simple task decomposition and lack structured frameworks for long-horizon decisionmaking with explicit planning, execution, and supervision. To address this, we propose Chain-of-Agents Planner (CoA-Planner), a framework that explicitly coordinates Planning Agents, Worker Agents, and a Supervisor Agent through a structured task graph. The Planning Agent decomposes complex tasks into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of subtasks with dependencies,Worker Agents execute specialized subtasks, and the Supervisor Agent monitors progress and resolves conflicts at critical milestones. Our framework introduces adaptive role reconfiguration that dynamically adjusts agent assignments based on historical performance metrics. We evaluate CoA-Planner on several long-context benchmarks including document analysis (50K-120K tokens), codebase review, and technical report generation. Experimental results show that CoA-Planner achieves an average success rate of 67.9%, outperforming single-agent LLMs by 23.5 percentage points (pp), Chain-of-Thought with RAG by 17.9pp, and existing Chain-of-Agents frameworks by 10.4pp. The framework demonstrates efficient scaling with 4-5 worker agents and reduces error rates across all categories, particularly in context coverage and reasoning consistency.

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Publication Details

Journal
Preprints.org
Published
2026-10-30
DOI
https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202610.3027.v1
Primary Topic
AI-based Problem Solving and Planning
Type
preprint
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preprint

Chain-of-Agents Planner: Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration for Long-Horizon Decision Making

Xiao Tan, Mengyuan Ren, Donghao Li, Xiang Li et al.
Preprints.org
AI-based Problem Solving and Planning
preprint

Chain-of-Agents Planner: Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration for Long-Horizon Decision Making

Xiao Tan, Mengyuan Ren, Donghao Li, Xiang Li, Yu Yang
preprint en

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks through multi-agent collaboration. However, existing approaches primarily focus on open-ended reasoning or simple task decomposition and lack structured frameworks for long-horizon decisionmaking with explicit planning, execution, and supervision. To address this, we propose Chain-of-Agents Planner (CoA-Planner), a framework that explicitly coordinates Planning Agents, Worker Agents, and a Supervisor Agent through a structured task graph. The Planning Agent decomposes complex tasks into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of subtasks with dependencies,Worker Agents execute specialized subtasks, and the Supervisor Agent monitors progress and resolves conflicts at critical milestones. Our framework introduces adaptive role reconfiguration that dynamically adjusts agent assignments based on historical performance metrics. We evaluate CoA-Planner on several long-context benchmarks including document analysis (50K-120K tokens), codebase review, and technical report generation. Experimental results show that CoA-Planner achieves an average success rate of 67.9%, outperforming single-agent LLMs by 23.5 percentage points (pp), Chain-of-Thought with RAG by 17.9pp, and existing Chain-of-Agents frameworks by 10.4pp. The framework demonstrates efficient scaling with 4-5 worker agents and reduces error rates across all categories, particularly in context coverage and reasoning consistency.

Preprints.org
AI-based Problem Solving and Planning
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Chain-of-Agents Planner: Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration for Long-Horizon Decision Making — Xiao Tan, Mengyuan Ren, et al. · Preprints.org (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS