MAESTRO: Multi-Agent Evaluation Suite for Testing, Reliability, and Observability
This provides a systematic evaluation tool for researchers and developers working on agentic systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks and benchmarks.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) by introducing MAESTRO, a standardized evaluation suite that reveals substantial run-to-run variance in performance and reliability, with MAS architecture being the dominant driver of resource profiles and trade-offs.
We present MAESTRO, an evaluation suite for the testing, reliability, and observability of LLM-based MAS. MAESTRO standardizes MAS configuration and execution through a unified interface, supports integrating both native and third-party MAS via a repository of examples and lightweight adapters, and exports framework-agnostic execution traces together with system-level signals (e.g., latency, cost, and failures). We instantiate MAESTRO with 12 representative MAS spanning popular agentic frameworks and interaction patterns, and conduct controlled experiments across repeated runs, backend models, and tool configurations. Our case studies show that MAS executions can be structurally stable yet temporally variable, leading to substantial run-to-run variance in performance and reliability. We further find that MAS architecture is the dominant driver of resource profiles, reproducibility, and cost-latency-accuracy trade-off, often outweighing changes in backend models or tool settings. Overall, MAESTRO enables systematic evaluation and provides empirical guidance for designing and optimizing agentic systems.