Locally Coherent, Globally Incoherent: Bounding Compositional Incoherence in Multi-Component LLM Agents

Multi-component LLM agents assemble probabilistic claims from components that each see only part of a joint problem; the composition can violate basic probability axioms even when every component is locally coherent. We formalise this locally coherent, globally incoherent failure via the compositional residual eps*, the L2 distance from the composed quote to the joint coherent polytope, computable