Evaluation and Coordination Benchmarks

Five 2025-2026 benchmarks cover the multi-agent evaluation space. **MultiAgentBench / MARBLE** (ACL 2025, arXiv:2503.01935) evaluates star/chain/tree/graph topologies with milestone KPIs; **graph is best for research**, cognitive planning adds ~3% milestone achievement. **COMMA** evaluates multimodal asymmetric-information coordination; state-of-the-art models including GPT-4o struggle to beat a random baseline. **MedAgentBoard** (arXiv:2505.12371) covers four medical task categories and often finds multi-agent does not dominate single-LLM. **AgentArch** (arXiv:2509.10769) benchmarks enterprise agent architectures combining tool-use + memory + orchestration. **SWE-bench Pro** ([arXiv:2509.16941](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16941)) has 1865 problems across 41 repos spanning business apps, B2B services, and developer tools; frontier models score ~23% on Pro vs 70%+ on Verified — a reality check on contamination. Claude Opus 4.7 (April 2026) is reported at **64.3%** on Pro with explicit agent-teams coordination (no Anthropic primary source published yet — treat as preliminary); Verdent (agent scaffold) hits **76.1% pass@1** on Verified ([Verdent technical report](https://www.verdent.ai/blog/swe-bench-verified-technical-report)). **AAAI 2026 Bridge Program WMAC** (https://multiagents.org/2026/) is the 2026 community focal point. This lesson builds on MARBLE's metrics, runs a topology-vs-metric sweep, and pins the "just passing SWE-bench Verified is not evidence of generalization" rule.

Learn 1.3 hr Python (stdlib)

Prerequisites: Phase 16 · 15 (Voting and Debate Topology), Phase 16 · 23 (Failure Modes)

#Problem

When a paper claims "our multi-agent system is better," the question is: better than what, on what, measured how? The 2023-2024 era of multi-agent evaluation was chaos — everyone picked their own metrics, their own baselines, and their own task sets. The 2025-2026 benchmarks imposed structure.

Without shared benchmarks, you cannot compare two multi-agent systems meaningfully. Worse, without hold-out benchmarks, frontier models can contaminate. SWE-bench Verified became partially contaminated in training corpora by mid-2025; frontier scores inflated; Pro was designed as an uncontaminated reality check.

This lesson enumerates the five canonical 2026 benchmarks, names what each measures, and teaches you to read benchmark claims skeptically.

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The text and code of this lesson are based on AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare, MIT licensed.