Chow-Liu Ordering for Long-Context Reasoning in Chain-of-Agents
Naman Gupta, Vaibhav Singh, Arun Iyer, Kirankumar Shiragur, Pratham Grover, Ramakrishna B. Bairi, Ritabrata Maiti, Sankarshan Damle, Shachee Mishra Gupta, Rishikesh Maurya, Vageesh D. C · Mar 10, 2026 · Citations: 0
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Abstract
Sequential multi-agent reasoning frameworks such as Chain-of-Agents (CoA) handle long-context queries by decomposing inputs into chunks and processing them sequentially using LLM-based worker agents that read from and update a bounded shared memory. From a probabilistic perspective, CoA aims to approximate the conditional distribution corresponding to a model capable of jointly reasoning over the entire long context. CoA achieves this through a latent-state factorization in which only bounded summaries of previously processed evidence are passed between agents. The resulting bounded-memory approximation introduces a lossy information bottleneck, making the final evidence state inherently dependent on the order in which chunks are processed. In this work, we study the problem of chunk ordering for long-context reasoning. We use the well-known Chow-Liu trees to learn a dependency structure that prioritizes strongly related chunks. Empirically, we show that a breadth-first traversal of the resulting tree yields chunk orderings that reduce information loss across agents and consistently outperform both default document-chunk ordering and semantic score-based ordering in answer relevance and exact-match accuracy across three long-context benchmarks.