TandemBench: Benchmarking Decision Models for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2611.05827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision models choose among predefined options in tasks such as routing and action selection. In multi-agent collaboration, a decision determines how members divide work, exchange resources, and act in parallel. We introduce TandemBench, a benchmark of 1,200 questions in multi-agent cooking scenarios where coordination choices affect goal completion. Models receive complete global information and candidate team plans, with reference answers established through execution and exact search. Models select an optimal team plan and, in paired variants that retain or remove it, judge whether better arrangements exist beyond the supplied options. We evaluate 40 native decision models and compare them with 10 general-purpose language models. The best native decision model achieves 62.50% decision accuracy. Native decision models remain close to chance in optimality verification. Paired tests reveal that some report better alternatives regardless of whether an optimal plan is already present. These findings show that team-plan decision accuracy alone can conceal systematic errors in judging whether the supplied options contain an optimal arrangement. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/lililibaohang/TandemBench.