Two Calls Beat Five Agents: Evaluating Multi-Agent Pipelines Against Self-Refinement for Local Language Models

Multi-agent LLM pipeline systems break down the task among multiple roles for better reasoning, but are benchmarked mainly with large-scale commercial models. In this study, we investigate Parishad, a structured multi-agent system involving five roles, by deploying it on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, a local model, on two datasets: GSM8K (500 questions) and HumanEval (164 questions), compared with prompting directly and two-call self-refinement. The multi-agent system drops GSM8K accuracy from 75.0% to 45.0% with JSON data format due to the error accumulation problem. With plaintext format, the accuracy is restored to 82.0%. A two-call self-refinement strategy (V1) can achieve 86.2% accuracy on GSM8K, with 7.4\times lower token usage. However, the same V1 implementation on HumanEval---where direct accuracy is already 96.3%---actively destroys performance (66.5%). A task-aware gated redesign (V2) applied to HumanEval preserves accuracy at 95.1%. Our results demonstrate that communication format and implementation details determine outcomes more than architectural complexity, and that simpler approaches match or outperform multi-agent pipelines for local 7B model deployment. All code and data are released.