Locally Coherent, Globally Incoherent: Bounding Compositional Incoherence in Multi-Component LLM Agents
Abstract
Multi-component LLM agents assemble probabilistic claims from components that each see only part of a joint problem; the composition can violate basic probability axioms even when every component is locally coherent. We formalise this locally coherent, globally incoherent failure via the compositional residual eps*, the L2 distance from the composed quote to the joint coherent polytope, computable at runtime from system output and the declared cross-component coupling constraints. A product-structure dichotomy characterises when local coherence suffices, and a Rayleigh-quotient prediction matches the observed residual within 7% on three of four relation classes. A hierarchical Boyle-Dykstra projection repairs the composition deterministically; an anytime-valid e-process gives sequential coherence monitoring. Across 1,876 ensemble cliques on a four-LLM mid-tier panel (frontier-panel rerun in Section 5.5), eps* > 0 on 33-94% of cliques, translating to +0.115 nats per bet of regret on 1,770 resolved bets under the proportional allocation rule (the gain collapses to +0.006 under bettors that themselves coherentise). Three intuitive LLM-side mitigations(retrieval, partition-aware prompting, aggregator-LLM) each fail or regress.
Comments: 25 pages, 7 figures, 24 tables. Preliminary versions to appear at the ICML 2026 Workshops on Combining Theory and Benchmarks (CTB), Statistical Frameworks for Uncertainty in Agentic Systems (AgenticUQ), and Failure Modes of Agentic AI (FAGEN)
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.30335,
title = {Locally Coherent, Globally Incoherent: Bounding Compositional Incoherence in Multi-Component LLM Agents},
author = {Anany Kotawala},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30335},
year = {2026}
}