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MASEval: Extending Multi-Agent Evaluation from Models to Systems

arXiv cs.AI / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • MASEval is a new evaluation framework designed to assess entire multi-agent LLM-based systems, rather than focusing solely on the underlying models.
  • The framework emphasizes the importance of system-level components such as topology, orchestration logic, and error handling, which significantly influence overall performance.
  • Experimental comparisons using MASEval across 3 benchmarks, 3 models, and 3 frameworks demonstrate that the choice of framework impacts performance as much as the model choice.
  • MASEval provides researchers and practitioners with a tool to systematically explore and optimize all system components, facilitating better design and deployment of agentic systems.
  • The library is open-source under the MIT license, enabling broad adoption and extension by the community.

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2603.08835 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Mar 2026]

Title:MASEval: Extending Multi-Agent Evaluation from Models to Systems

View a PDF of the paper titled MASEval: Extending Multi-Agent Evaluation from Models to Systems, by Cornelius Emde and 6 other authors
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Abstract:The rapid adoption of LLM-based agentic systems has produced a rich ecosystem of frameworks (smolagents, LangGraph, AutoGen, CAMEL, LlamaIndex, i.a.). Yet existing benchmarks are model-centric: they fix the agentic setup and do not compare other system components. We argue that implementation decisions substantially impact performance, including choices such as topology, orchestration logic, and error handling. MASEval addresses this evaluation gap with a framework-agnostic library that treats the entire system as the unit of analysis. Through a systematic system-level comparison across 3 benchmarks, 3 models, and 3 frameworks, we find that framework choice matters as much as model choice. MASEval allows researchers to explore all components of agentic systems, opening new avenues for principled system design, and practitioners to identify the best implementation for their use case.
MASEval is available under the MIT licence this https URL.
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.08835 [cs.AI]
  (or arXiv:2603.08835v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.08835
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Cornelius Emde [view email]
[v1] Mon, 9 Mar 2026 18:46:17 UTC (45 KB)
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