Faithful, Not Corrective: Message-Format Effects in Multi-Hop Agent Relays Are Tier-Dependent

Abstract

arXiv:2607.09678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When LLM agents hand off information to one another, does the message format matter? Two literatures disagree: format-optimization work reports that structured messages cut cost without hurting accuracy, while format-restriction work finds that imposing structure degrades generation -- and neither measures what happens when a message traverses multiple hops, where copy fidelity, not one-shot generation, dominates. We introduce a controlled relay te