English

Provable Coordination for LLM Agents via Message Sequence Charts

Programming Languages 2026-04-30 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) are difficult to reason about. Coordination errors such as deadlocks or type-mismatched messages are often hard to detect through testing. We introduce a domain-specific language for specifying agent coordination based on message sequence charts (MSCs). The language separates message-passing structure from LLM actions, whose outputs remain unpredictable. We define the syntax and semantics of the language and present a syntax-directed projection that generates deadlock-free local agent programs from global coordination specifications. We illustrate the approach with a diagnosis consensus protocol and show how coordination properties can be established independently of LLM nondeterminism. We also describe a runtime planning extension in which an LLM dynamically generates a coordination workflow for which the same structural guarantees apply. An open-source Python implementation of our framework is available as ZipperGen.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.17612,
  title  = {Provable Coordination for LLM Agents via Message Sequence Charts},
  author = {Benedikt Bollig and Matthias Függer and Thomas Nowak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17612},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

40 pages; v2: All definitions and results are now mechanically verified in Lean 4

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:17:15.812Z