Epistemic-Probabilistic Model for Guarded Multi-Agent LLM Coordination

Abstract: Multi-agent LLMs have become ubiquitous in applied AI, yet their theoretical foundations remain surprisingly understudied. Viewed through the lens of multi-agent systems theory, several shortcomings come to light: a lack of social intelligence, the absence of coordination mechanisms among agents, unknown emergent behavior, and interactions between agents that are bounded by natural language. We address two of these gaps: the absence of social behavior and the lack of mechanisms for inter-agent coordination. We introduce Epistemic Probabilistic Language Agents (EPLA), a neuro-symbolic architecture for multi-agent coordination under uncertainty. A Symbolic Guard provides structured diagnostic feedback. The LLM generates typed actions, and the Guard controls their execution against an authoritative symbolic state. We formalize the epistemic layer in a gossip testbed through epistemic lottery gossip models, which combine view-based call histories with agent-indexed probability weights. We argue that implementing such a formalism can address shortcomings of agentic LLMs.