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Dec 9

Knowledge-Aware Iterative Retrieval for Multi-Agent Systems

We introduce a novel large language model (LLM)-driven agent framework, which iteratively refines queries and filters contextual evidence by leveraging dynamically evolving knowledge. A defining feature of the system is its decoupling of external sources from an internal knowledge cache that is progressively updated to guide both query generation and evidence selection. This design mitigates bias-reinforcement loops and enables dynamic, trackable search exploration paths, thereby optimizing the trade-off between exploring diverse information and maintaining accuracy through autonomous agent decision-making. Our approach is evaluated on a broad range of open-domain question answering benchmarks, including multi-step tasks that mirror real-world scenarios where integrating information from multiple sources is critical, especially given the vulnerabilities of LLMs that lack explicit reasoning or planning capabilities. The results show that the proposed system not only outperforms single-step baselines regardless of task difficulty but also, compared to conventional iterative retrieval methods, demonstrates pronounced advantages in complex tasks through precise evidence-based reasoning and enhanced efficiency. The proposed system supports both competitive and collaborative sharing of updated context, enabling multi-agent extension. The benefits of multi-agent configurations become especially prominent as task difficulty increases. The number of convergence steps scales with task difficulty, suggesting cost-effective scalability.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 17

Revisiting Multi-Agent Debate as Test-Time Scaling: A Systematic Study of Conditional Effectiveness

The remarkable growth in large language model (LLM) capabilities has spurred exploration into multi-agent systems, with debate frameworks emerging as a promising avenue for enhanced problem-solving. These multi-agent debate (MAD) approaches, where agents collaboratively present, critique, and refine arguments, potentially offer improved reasoning, robustness, and diverse perspectives over monolithic models. Despite prior studies leveraging MAD, a systematic understanding of its effectiveness compared to self-agent methods, particularly under varying conditions, remains elusive. This paper seeks to fill this gap by conceptualizing MAD as a test-time computational scaling technique, distinguished by collaborative refinement and diverse exploration capabilities. We conduct a comprehensive empirical investigation comparing MAD with strong self-agent test-time scaling baselines on mathematical reasoning and safety-related tasks. Our study systematically examines the influence of task difficulty, model scale, and agent diversity on MAD's performance. Key findings reveal that, for mathematical reasoning, MAD offers limited advantages over self-agent scaling but becomes more effective with increased problem difficulty and decreased model capability, while agent diversity shows little benefit. Conversely, for safety tasks, MAD's collaborative refinement can increase vulnerability, but incorporating diverse agent configurations facilitates a gradual reduction in attack success through the collaborative refinement process. We believe our findings provide critical guidance for the future development of more effective and strategically deployed MAD systems.

  • 6 authors
·
May 28 1

Agentic Neural Networks: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

Leveraging multiple Large Language Models(LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network(ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative "team" focused on a specific subtask. Agentic Neural Network follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase-Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase-Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables ANN to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across four benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. Our findings indicate that ANN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for multi-agent systems, combining the collaborative capabilities of LLMs with the efficiency and flexibility of neural network principles. We plan to open-source the entire framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 10

TRiSM for Agentic AI: A Review of Trust, Risk, and Security Management in LLM-based Agentic Multi-Agent Systems

Agentic AI systems, built on large language models (LLMs) and deployed in multi-agent configurations, are redefining intelligent autonomy, collaboration and decision-making across enterprise and societal domains. This review presents a structured analysis of Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) in the context of LLM-based agentic multi-agent systems (AMAS). We begin by examining the conceptual foundations of agentic AI, its architectural differences from traditional AI agents, and the emerging system designs that enable scalable, tool-using autonomy. The TRiSM in the agentic AI framework is then detailed through four pillars governance, explainability, ModelOps, and privacy/security each contextualized for agentic LLMs. We identify unique threat vectors and introduce a comprehensive risk taxonomy for the agentic AI applications, supported by case studies illustrating real-world vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the paper also surveys trust-building mechanisms, transparency and oversight techniques, and state-of-the-art explainability strategies in distributed LLM agent systems. Additionally, metrics for evaluating trust, interpretability, and human-centered performance are reviewed alongside open benchmarking challenges. Security and privacy are addressed through encryption, adversarial defense, and compliance with evolving AI regulations. The paper concludes with a roadmap for responsible agentic AI, proposing research directions to align emerging multi-agent systems with robust TRiSM principles for safe, accountable, and transparent deployment.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 4 2

Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.

The Fellowship of the LLMs: Multi-Agent Workflows for Synthetic Preference Optimization Dataset Generation

This paper presents synthetic Preference Optimization (PO) datasets generated using multi-agent workflows and evaluates the effectiveness and potential of these workflows in the dataset generation process. PO dataset generation requires two modules: (1) response evaluation, and (2) response generation. In the response evaluation module, the responses from Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated and ranked - a task typically carried out by human annotators that we automate using LLMs. We assess the response evaluation module in a 2 step process. In step 1, we assess LLMs as evaluators using three distinct prompting strategies. In step 2, we apply the winning prompting strategy to compare the performance of LLM-as-a-Judge, LLMs-as-a-Jury, and LLM Debate. In each step, we use inter-rater agreement using Cohen's Kappa between human annotators and LLMs. For the response generation module, we compare different configurations for the LLM Feedback Loop using the identified LLM evaluator configuration. We use the win rate (the fraction of times a generation framework is selected as the best by an LLM evaluator) to determine the best multi-agent configuration for generation. After identifying the best configurations for both modules, we use models from the GPT, Gemma, and Llama families to generate our PO datasets using the above pipeline. We generate two types of PO datasets, one to improve the generation capabilities of individual LLM and the other to improve the multi-agent workflow. Our evaluation shows that GPT-4o-as-a-Judge is more consistent across datasets when the candidate responses do not include responses from the GPT family. Additionally, we find that the LLM Feedback Loop, with Llama as the generator and Gemma as the reviewer, achieves a notable 71.8% and 73.8% win rate over single-agent Llama and Gemma, respectively.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 16, 2024

Adaptability in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: A Framework and Unified Review

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has shown clear effectiveness in coordinating multiple agents across simulated benchmarks and constrained scenarios. However, its deployment in real-world multi-agent systems (MAS) remains limited, primarily due to the complex and dynamic nature of such environments. These challenges arise from multiple interacting sources of variability, including fluctuating agent populations, evolving task goals, and inconsistent execution conditions. Together, these factors demand that MARL algorithms remain effective under continuously changing system configurations and operational demands. To better capture and assess this capacity for adjustment, we introduce the concept of adaptability as a unified and practically grounded lens through which to evaluate the reliability of MARL algorithms under shifting conditions, broadly referring to any changes in the environment dynamics that may occur during learning or execution. Centred on the notion of adaptability, we propose a structured framework comprising three key dimensions: learning adaptability, policy adaptability, and scenario-driven adaptability. By adopting this adaptability perspective, we aim to support more principled assessments of MARL performance beyond narrowly defined benchmarks. Ultimately, this survey contributes to the development of algorithms that are better suited for deployment in dynamic, real-world multi-agent systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 14

Knowledge-Informed Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction at Signalized Intersections for Infrastructure-to-Everything

Multi-agent trajectory prediction at signalized intersections is crucial for developing efficient intelligent transportation systems and safe autonomous driving systems. Due to the complexity of intersection scenarios and the limitations of single-vehicle perception, the performance of vehicle-centric prediction methods has reached a plateau. In this paper, we introduce an Infrastructure-to-Everything (I2X) collaborative prediction scheme. In this scheme, roadside units (RSUs) independently forecast the future trajectories of all vehicles and transmit these predictions unidirectionally to subscribing vehicles. Building on this scheme, we propose I2XTraj, a dedicated infrastructure-based trajectory prediction model. I2XTraj leverages real-time traffic signal states, prior maneuver strategy knowledge, and multi-agent interactions to generate accurate, joint multi-modal trajectory prediction. First, a continuous signal-informed mechanism is proposed to adaptively process real-time traffic signals to guide trajectory proposal generation under varied intersection configurations. Second, a driving strategy awareness mechanism estimates the joint distribution of maneuver strategies by integrating spatial priors of intersection areas with dynamic vehicle states, enabling coverage of the full set of feasible maneuvers. Third, a spatial-temporal-mode attention network models multi-agent interactions to refine and adjust joint trajectory outputs.Finally, I2XTraj is evaluated on two real-world datasets of signalized intersections, the V2X-Seq and the SinD drone dataset. In both single-infrastructure and online collaborative scenarios, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by over 30\% on V2X-Seq and 15\% on SinD, demonstrating strong generalizability and robustness.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23

RG-Attn: Radian Glue Attention for Multi-modality Multi-agent Cooperative Perception

Cooperative perception offers an optimal solution to overcome the perception limitations of single-agent systems by leveraging Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication for data sharing and fusion across multiple agents. However, most existing approaches focus on single-modality data exchange, limiting the potential of both homogeneous and heterogeneous fusion across agents. This overlooks the opportunity to utilize multi-modality data per agent, restricting the system's performance. In the automotive industry, manufacturers adopt diverse sensor configurations, resulting in heterogeneous combinations of sensor modalities across agents. To harness the potential of every possible data source for optimal performance, we design a robust LiDAR and camera cross-modality fusion module, Radian-Glue-Attention (RG-Attn), applicable to both intra-agent cross-modality fusion and inter-agent cross-modality fusion scenarios, owing to the convenient coordinate conversion by transformation matrix and the unified sampling/inversion mechanism. We also propose two different architectures, named Paint-To-Puzzle (PTP) and Co-Sketching-Co-Coloring (CoS-CoCo), for conducting cooperative perception. PTP aims for maximum precision performance and achieves smaller data packet size by limiting cross-agent fusion to a single instance, but requiring all participants to be equipped with LiDAR. In contrast, CoS-CoCo supports agents with any configuration-LiDAR-only, camera-only, or LiDAR-camera-both, presenting more generalization ability. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both real and simulated cooperative perception datasets. The code is now available at GitHub.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 28

Effective control of two-dimensional Rayleigh--Bénard convection: invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning is all you need

Rayleigh-B\'enard convection (RBC) is a recurrent phenomenon in several industrial and geoscience flows and a well-studied system from a fundamental fluid-mechanics viewpoint. However, controlling RBC, for example by modulating the spatial distribution of the bottom-plate heating in the canonical RBC configuration, remains a challenging topic for classical control-theory methods. In the present work, we apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for controlling RBC. We show that effective RBC control can be obtained by leveraging invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which takes advantage of the locality and translational invariance inherent to RBC flows inside wide channels. The MARL framework applied to RBC allows for an increase in the number of control segments without encountering the curse of dimensionality that would result from a naive increase in the DRL action-size dimension. This is made possible by the MARL ability for re-using the knowledge generated in different parts of the RBC domain. We show in a case study that MARL DRL is able to discover an advanced control strategy that destabilizes the spontaneous RBC double-cell pattern, changes the topology of RBC by coalescing adjacent convection cells, and actively controls the resulting coalesced cell to bring it to a new stable configuration. This modified flow configuration results in reduced convective heat transfer, which is beneficial in several industrial processes. Therefore, our work both shows the potential of MARL DRL for controlling large RBC systems, as well as demonstrates the possibility for DRL to discover strategies that move the RBC configuration between different topological configurations, yielding desirable heat-transfer characteristics. These results are useful for both gaining further understanding of the intrinsic properties of RBC, as well as for developing industrial applications.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 5, 2023

CRAKEN: Cybersecurity LLM Agent with Knowledge-Based Execution

Large Language Model (LLM) agents can automate cybersecurity tasks and can adapt to the evolving cybersecurity landscape without re-engineering. While LLM agents have demonstrated cybersecurity capabilities on Capture-The-Flag (CTF) competitions, they have two key limitations: accessing latest cybersecurity expertise beyond training data, and integrating new knowledge into complex task planning. Knowledge-based approaches that incorporate technical understanding into the task-solving automation can tackle these limitations. We present CRAKEN, a knowledge-based LLM agent framework that improves cybersecurity capability through three core mechanisms: contextual decomposition of task-critical information, iterative self-reflected knowledge retrieval, and knowledge-hint injection that transforms insights into adaptive attack strategies. Comprehensive evaluations with different configurations show CRAKEN's effectiveness in multi-stage vulnerability detection and exploitation compared to previous approaches. Our extensible architecture establishes new methodologies for embedding new security knowledge into LLM-driven cybersecurity agentic systems. With a knowledge database of CTF writeups, CRAKEN obtained an accuracy of 22% on NYU CTF Bench, outperforming prior works by 3% and achieving state-of-the-art results. On evaluation of MITRE ATT&CK techniques, CRAKEN solves 25-30% more techniques than prior work, demonstrating improved cybersecurity capabilities via knowledge-based execution. We make our framework open source to public https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/nyuctf_agents_craken.

  • 12 authors
·
May 21

Parallel Bayesian Optimization of Agent-based Transportation Simulation

MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit) is an open source large-scale agent-based transportation planning project applied to various areas like road transport, public transport, freight transport, regional evacuation, etc. BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility) framework extends MATSim to enable powerful and scalable analysis of urban transportation systems. The agents from the BEAM simulation exhibit 'mode choice' behavior based on multinomial logit model. In our study, we consider eight mode choices viz. bike, car, walk, ride hail, driving to transit, walking to transit, ride hail to transit, and ride hail pooling. The 'alternative specific constants' for each mode choice are critical hyperparameters in a configuration file related to a particular scenario under experimentation. We use the 'Urbansim-10k' BEAM scenario (with 10,000 population size) for all our experiments. Since these hyperparameters affect the simulation in complex ways, manual calibration methods are time consuming. We present a parallel Bayesian optimization method with early stopping rule to achieve fast convergence for the given multi-in-multi-out problem to its optimal configurations. Our model is based on an open source HpBandSter package. This approach combines hierarchy of several 1D Kernel Density Estimators (KDE) with a cheap evaluator (Hyperband, a single multidimensional KDE). Our model has also incorporated extrapolation based early stopping rule. With our model, we could achieve a 25% L1 norm for a large-scale BEAM simulation in fully autonomous manner. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first of its kind applied to large-scale multi-agent transportation simulations. This work can be useful for surrogate modeling of scenarios with very large populations.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 11, 2022

Foam-Agent 2.0: An End-to-End Composable Multi-Agent Framework for Automating CFD Simulation in OpenFOAM

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an essential simulation tool in engineering, yet its steep learning curve and complex manual setup create significant barriers. To address these challenges, we introduce Foam-Agent, a multi-agent framework that automates the entire end-to-end OpenFOAM workflow from a single natural language prompt. Our key innovations address critical gaps in existing systems: 1. An Comprehensive End-to-End Simulation Automation: Foam-Agent is the first system to manage the full simulation pipeline, including advanced pre-processing with a versatile Meshing Agent capable of handling external mesh files and generating new geometries via Gmsh, automatic generation of HPC submission scripts, and post-simulation visualization via ParaView. 2. Composable Service Architecture: Going beyond a monolithic agent, the framework uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to expose its core functions as discrete, callable tools. This allows for flexible integration and use by other agentic systems, such as Claude-code, for more exploratory workflows. 3. High-Fidelity Configuration Generation: We achieve superior accuracy through a Hierarchical Multi-Index RAG for precise context retrieval and a dependency-aware generation process that ensures configuration consistency. Evaluated on a benchmark of 110 simulation tasks, Foam-Agent achieves an 88.2% success rate with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, significantly outperforming existing frameworks (55.5% for MetaOpenFOAM). Foam-Agent dramatically lowers the expertise barrier for CFD, demonstrating how specialized multi-agent systems can democratize complex scientific computing. The code is public at https://github.com/csml-rpi/Foam-Agent.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17

Code2MCP: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Transformation of Code Repositories into Model Context Protocol Services

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created a significant integration challenge in the AI agent ecosystem, often called the "N times M problem," where N models require custom integrations for M tools. This fragmentation stifles innovation and creates substantial development overhead. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standard to resolve this, its adoption is hindered by the manual effort required to convert the vast universe of existing software into MCP-compliant services. This is especially true for the millions of open-source repositories on GitHub, the world's largest collection of functional code. This paper introduces Code2MCP, a highly automated, agentic framework designed to transform any GitHub repository into a functional MCP service with minimal human intervention. Our system employs a multi-stage workflow that automates the entire process, from code analysis and environment configuration to service generation and deployment. A key innovation of our framework is an LLM-driven, closed-loop "Run--Review--Fix" cycle, which enables the system to autonomously debug and repair the code it generates. Code2MCP produces not only deployable services but also comprehensive technical documentation, acting as a catalyst to accelerate the MCP ecosystem by systematically unlocking the world's largest open-source code repository and automating the critical last mile of tool integration. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/DEFENSE-SEU/MCP-Github-Agent.

AgentRouter: A Knowledge-Graph-Guided LLM Router for Collaborative Multi-Agent Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) and agent-based frameworks have advanced rapidly, enabling diverse applications. Yet, with the proliferation of models and agentic strategies, practitioners face substantial uncertainty in selecting the best configuration for a downstream task. Prior studies show that different agents and backbones exhibit complementary strengths, and that larger models are not always superior, underscoring the need for adaptive routing mechanisms. Existing approaches to agent routing, however, often emphasize cost efficiency while overlooking the fine-grained contextual and relational structure inherent in QA tasks. In this paper, we propose tAgentRouter, a framework that formulates multi-agent QA as a knowledge-graph-guided routing problem supervised by empirical performance signals. Specifically, we convert QA instance into a knowledge graph that jointly encodes queries, contextual entities, and agents, and then train a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) to propagate information across node types and produce task-aware routing distributions over agents. By leveraging soft supervision and weighted aggregation of agent outputs, AgentRouter learns principled collaboration schemes that capture the complementary strengths of diverse agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms single-agent and ensemble baselines, while generalizing across benchmarks and LLM backbones. These results highlight the effectiveness and robustness of graph-supervised multi-agent routing for question answering.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 6

ELMES: An Automated Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models in Educational Scenarios

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents transformative opportunities for education, generating numerous novel application scenarios. However, significant challenges remain: evaluation metrics vary substantially across different educational scenarios, while many emerging scenarios lack appropriate assessment metrics. Current benchmarks predominantly measure general intelligence rather than pedagogical capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce ELMES, an open-source automated evaluation framework specifically designed for assessing LLMs in educational settings. ELMES features a modular architecture that enables researchers to create dynamic, multi-agent dialogues through simple configuration files, facilitating flexible scenario design without requiring extensive programming expertise. The framework incorporates a hybrid evaluation engine that objectively quantifies traditionally subjective pedagogical metrics using an LLM-as-a-Judge methodology. We conduct systematic benchmarking of state-of-the-art LLMs across four critical educational scenarios: Knowledge Point Explanation, Guided Problem-Solving Teaching, Interdisciplinary Lesson Plan Generation, and Contextualized Question Generation, employing fine-grained metrics developed in collaboration with education specialists. Our results demonstrate distinct capability distributions among models, revealing context-specific strengths and limitations. ELMES provides educators and researchers with an accessible evaluation framework that significantly reduces adaptation barriers for diverse educational applications while advancing the practical implementation of LLMs in pedagogy. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/sii-research/elmes.git.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 27

A Survey of LLM $\times$ DATA

The integration of large language model (LLM) and data management (DATA) is rapidly redefining both domains. In this survey, we comprehensively review the bidirectional relationships. On the one hand, DATA4LLM, spanning large-scale data processing, storage, and serving, feeds LLMs with high quality, diversity, and timeliness of data required for stages like pre-training, post-training, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows: (i) Data processing for LLMs includes scalable acquisition, deduplication, filtering, selection, domain mixing, and synthetic augmentation; (ii) Data Storage for LLMs focuses on efficient data and model formats, distributed and heterogeneous storage hierarchies, KV-cache management, and fault-tolerant checkpointing; (iii) Data serving for LLMs tackles challenges in RAG (e.g., knowledge post-processing), LLM inference (e.g., prompt compression, data provenance), and training strategies (e.g., data packing and shuffling). On the other hand, in LLM4DATA, LLMs are emerging as general-purpose engines for data management. We review recent advances in (i) data manipulation, including automatic data cleaning, integration, discovery; (ii) data analysis, covering reasoning over structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and (iii) system optimization (e.g., configuration tuning, query rewriting, anomaly diagnosis), powered by LLM techniques like retrieval-augmented prompting, task-specialized fine-tuning, and multi-agent collaboration.

  • 17 authors
·
May 23

TimeSeriesScientist: A General-Purpose AI Agent for Time Series Analysis

Time series forecasting is central to decision-making in domains as diverse as energy, finance, climate, and public health. In practice, forecasters face thousands of short, noisy series that vary in frequency, quality, and horizon, where the dominant cost lies not in model fitting, but in the labor-intensive preprocessing, validation, and ensembling required to obtain reliable predictions. Prevailing statistical and deep learning models are tailored to specific datasets or domains and generalize poorly. A general, domain-agnostic framework that minimizes human intervention is urgently in demand. In this paper, we introduce TimeSeriesScientist (TSci), the first LLM-driven agentic framework for general time series forecasting. The framework comprises four specialized agents: Curator performs LLM-guided diagnostics augmented by external tools that reason over data statistics to choose targeted preprocessing; Planner narrows the hypothesis space of model choice by leveraging multi-modal diagnostics and self-planning over the input; Forecaster performs model fitting and validation and, based on the results, adaptively selects the best model configuration as well as ensemble strategy to make final predictions; and Reporter synthesizes the whole process into a comprehensive, transparent report. With transparent natural-language rationales and comprehensive reports, TSci transforms the forecasting workflow into a white-box system that is both interpretable and extensible across tasks. Empirical results on eight established benchmarks demonstrate that TSci consistently outperforms both statistical and LLM-based baselines, reducing forecast error by an average of 10.4% and 38.2%, respectively. Moreover, TSci produces a clear and rigorous report that makes the forecasting workflow more transparent and interpretable.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 1 2

Contrastive learning-based agent modeling for deep reinforcement learning

Multi-agent systems often require agents to collaborate with or compete against other agents with diverse goals, behaviors, or strategies. Agent modeling is essential when designing adaptive policies for intelligent machine agents in multiagent systems, as this is the means by which the ego agent understands other agents' behavior and extracts their meaningful policy representations. These representations can be used to enhance the ego agent's adaptive policy which is trained by reinforcement learning. However, existing agent modeling approaches typically assume the availability of local observations from other agents (modeled agents) during training or a long observation trajectory for policy adaption. To remove these constrictive assumptions and improve agent modeling performance, we devised a Contrastive Learning-based Agent Modeling (CLAM) method that relies only on the local observations from the ego agent during training and execution. With these observations, CLAM is capable of generating consistent high-quality policy representations in real-time right from the beginning of each episode. We evaluated the efficacy of our approach in both cooperative and competitive multi-agent environments. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art on both cooperative and competitive tasks, highlighting the potential of contrastive learning-based agent modeling for enhancing reinforcement learning.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

AgentsNet: Coordination and Collaborative Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLMs

Large-language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful problem-solving capabilities, in particular when organized in multi-agent systems. However, the advent of such systems also raises several questions on the ability of a complex network of agents to effectively self-organize and collaborate. While measuring performance on standard reasoning benchmarks indicates how well multi-agent systems can solve reasoning tasks, it is unclear whether these systems are able to leverage their topology effectively. Here, we propose AgentsNet, a new benchmark for multi-agent reasoning. By drawing inspiration from classical problems in distributed systems and graph theory, AgentsNet measures the ability of multi-agent systems to collaboratively form strategies for problem-solving, self-organization, and effective communication given a network topology. We evaluate a variety of baseline methods on AgentsNet including homogeneous networks of agents which first have to agree on basic protocols for organization and communication. We find that some frontier LLMs are already demonstrating strong performance for small networks but begin to fall off once the size of the network scales. While existing multi-agent benchmarks cover at most 2-5 agents, AgentsNet is practically unlimited in size and can scale with new generations of LLMs. As such, we also probe frontier models in a setup with up to 100 agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 11 1

Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.

Very Large-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation in AgentScope

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for applying multi-agent systems in very large-scale simulations. However, there remain several challenges when conducting multi-agent simulations with existing platforms, such as limited scalability and low efficiency, unsatisfied agent diversity, and effort-intensive management processes. To address these challenges, we develop several new features and components for AgentScope, a user-friendly multi-agent platform, enhancing its convenience and flexibility for supporting very large-scale multi-agent simulations. Specifically, we propose an actor-based distributed mechanism as the underlying technological infrastructure towards great scalability and high efficiency, and provide flexible environment support for simulating various real-world scenarios, which enables parallel execution of multiple agents, centralized workflow orchestration, and both inter-agent and agent-environment interactions among agents. Moreover, we integrate an easy-to-use configurable tool and an automatic background generation pipeline in AgentScope, simplifying the process of creating agents with diverse yet detailed background settings. Last but not least, we provide a web-based interface for conveniently monitoring and managing a large number of agents that might deploy across multiple devices. We conduct a comprehensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements in AgentScope, and provide detailed observations and discussions to highlight the great potential of applying multi-agent systems in large-scale simulations. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope to inspire further research and development in large-scale multi-agent simulations.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024 2

AgentNet: Decentralized Evolutionary Coordination for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the development of multi-agent systems where multiple LLM-based agents collaborate on complex tasks. However, existing systems often rely on centralized coordination, leading to scalability bottlenecks, reduced adaptability, and single points of failure. Privacy and proprietary knowledge concerns further hinder cross-organizational collaboration, resulting in siloed expertise. We propose AgentNet, a decentralized, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based framework that enables LLM-based agents to specialize, evolve, and collaborate autonomously in a dynamically structured Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Unlike prior approaches with static roles or centralized control, AgentNet allows agents to adjust connectivity and route tasks based on local expertise and context. AgentNet introduces three key innovations: (1) a fully decentralized coordination mechanism that eliminates the need for a central orchestrator, enhancing robustness and emergent intelligence; (2) dynamic agent graph topology that adapts in real time to task demands, ensuring scalability and resilience; and (3) a retrieval-based memory system for agents that supports continual skill refinement and specialization. By minimizing centralized control and data exchange, AgentNet enables fault-tolerant, privacy-preserving collaboration across organizations. Experiments show that AgentNet achieves higher task accuracy than both single-agent and centralized multi-agent baselines.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 1

Automated Composition of Agents: A Knapsack Approach for Agentic Component Selection

Designing effective agentic systems requires the seamless composition and integration of agents, tools, and models within dynamic and uncertain environments. Most existing methods rely on static, semantic retrieval approaches for tool or agent discovery. However, effective reuse and composition of existing components remain challenging due to incomplete capability descriptions and the limitations of retrieval methods. Component selection suffers because the decisions are not based on capability, cost, and real-time utility. To address these challenges, we introduce a structured, automated framework for agentic system composition that is inspired by the knapsack problem. Our framework enables a composer agent to systematically identify, select, and assemble an optimal set of agentic components by jointly considering performance, budget constraints, and compatibility. By dynamically testing candidate components and modeling their utility in real-time, our approach streamlines the assembly of agentic systems and facilitates scalable reuse of resources. Empirical evaluation with Claude 3.5 Sonnet across five benchmarking datasets shows that our online-knapsack-based composer consistently lies on the Pareto frontier, achieving higher success rates at significantly lower component costs compared to our baselines. In the single-agent setup, the online knapsack composer shows a success rate improvement of up to 31.6% in comparison to the retrieval baselines. In multi-agent systems, the online knapsack composer increases success rate from 37% to 87% when agents are selected from an agent inventory of 100+ agents. The substantial performance gap confirms the robust adaptability of our method across diverse domains and budget constraints.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18 2

Aime: Towards Fully-Autonomous Multi-Agent Framework

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful paradigm for solving complex, multifaceted problems. However, the potential of these systems is often constrained by the prevalent plan-and-execute framework, which suffers from critical limitations: rigid plan execution, static agent capabilities, and inefficient communication. These weaknesses hinder their adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces Aime, a novel multi-agent framework designed to overcome these challenges through dynamic, reactive planning and execution. Aime replaces the conventional static workflow with a fluid and adaptive architecture. Its core innovations include: (1) a Dynamic Planner that continuously refines the overall strategy based on real-time execution feedback; (2) an Actor Factory that implements Dynamic Actor instantiation, assembling specialized agents on-demand with tailored tools and knowledge; and (3) a centralized Progress Management Module that serves as a single source of truth for coherent, system-wide state awareness. We empirically evaluated Aime on a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning general reasoning (GAIA), software engineering (SWE-bench Verified), and live web navigation (WebVoyager). The results demonstrate that Aime consistently outperforms even highly specialized state-of-the-art agents in their respective domains. Its superior adaptability and task success rate establish Aime as a more resilient and effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration.

  • 15 authors
·
Jul 16

Reproducibility Study of "Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents"

This study evaluates and extends the findings made by Piatti et al., who introduced GovSim, a simulation framework designed to assess the cooperative decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in resource-sharing scenarios. By replicating key experiments, we validate claims regarding the performance of large models, such as GPT-4-turbo, compared to smaller models. The impact of the universalization principle is also examined, with results showing that large models can achieve sustainable cooperation, with or without the principle, while smaller models fail without it. In addition, we provide multiple extensions to explore the applicability of the framework to new settings. We evaluate additional models, such as DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o-mini, to test whether cooperative behavior generalizes across different architectures and model sizes. Furthermore, we introduce new settings: we create a heterogeneous multi-agent environment, study a scenario using Japanese instructions, and explore an "inverse environment" where agents must cooperate to mitigate harmful resource distributions. Our results confirm that the benchmark can be applied to new models, scenarios, and languages, offering valuable insights into the adaptability of LLMs in complex cooperative tasks. Moreover, the experiment involving heterogeneous multi-agent systems demonstrates that high-performing models can influence lower-performing ones to adopt similar behaviors. This finding has significant implications for other agent-based applications, potentially enabling more efficient use of computational resources and contributing to the development of more effective cooperative AI systems.

  • 4 authors
·
May 14

Benchmarking LLMs' Swarm intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for complex reasoning, yet their capacity for emergent coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) when operating under strict constraints-such as limited local perception and communication, characteristic of natural swarms-remains largely unexplored, particularly concerning the nuances of swarm intelligence. Existing benchmarks often do not fully capture the unique challenges of decentralized coordination that arise when agents operate with incomplete spatio-temporal information. To bridge this gap, we introduce SwarmBench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the swarm intelligence capabilities of LLMs acting as decentralized agents. SwarmBench features five foundational MAS coordination tasks within a configurable 2D grid environment, forcing agents to rely primarily on local sensory input (k x k view) and local communication. We propose metrics for coordination effectiveness and analyze emergent group dynamics. Evaluating several leading LLMs in a zero-shot setting, we find significant performance variations across tasks, highlighting the difficulties posed by local information constraints. While some coordination emerges, results indicate limitations in robust planning and strategy formation under uncertainty in these decentralized scenarios. Assessing LLMs under swarm-like conditions is crucial for realizing their potential in future decentralized systems. We release SwarmBench as an open, extensible toolkit-built upon a customizable and scalable physical system with defined mechanical properties. It provides environments, prompts, evaluation scripts, and the comprehensive experimental datasets generated, aiming to foster reproducible research into LLM-based MAS coordination and the theoretical underpinnings of Embodied MAS. Our code repository is available at https://github.com/x66ccff/swarmbench.

  • 4 authors
·
May 7

A Benchmark for Generalizing Across Diverse Team Strategies in Competitive Pokémon

Developing AI agents that can robustly adapt to dramatically different strategic landscapes without retraining is a central challenge for multi-agent learning. Pok\'emon Video Game Championships (VGC) is a domain with an extraordinarily large space of possible team configurations of approximately 10^{139} - far larger than those of Dota or Starcraft. The highly discrete, combinatorial nature of team building in Pok\'emon VGC causes optimal strategies to shift dramatically depending on both the team being piloted and the opponent's team, making generalization uniquely challenging. To advance research on this problem, we introduce VGC-Bench: a benchmark that provides critical infrastructure, standardizes evaluation protocols, and supplies human-play datasets and a range of baselines - from large-language-model agents and behavior cloning to reinforcement learning and empirical game-theoretic methods such as self-play, fictitious play, and double oracle. In the restricted setting where an agent is trained and evaluated on a single-team configuration, our methods are able to win against a professional VGC competitor. We extensively evaluated all baseline methods over progressively larger team sets and find that even the best-performing algorithm in the single-team setting struggles at scaling up as team size grows. Thus, policy generalization across diverse team strategies remains an open challenge for the community. Our code is open sourced at https://github.com/cameronangliss/VGC-Bench.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11

Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs

With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI has become phenomenal in real-world applications, moving toward multiple LLM-based agents to perceive, learn, reason, and act collaboratively. These LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) enable groups of intelligent agents to coordinate and solve complex tasks collectively at scale, transitioning from isolated models to collaboration-centric approaches. This work provides an extensive survey of the collaborative aspect of MASs and introduces an extensible framework to guide future research. Our framework characterizes collaboration mechanisms based on key dimensions: actors (agents involved), types (e.g., cooperation, competition, or coopetition), structures (e.g., peer-to-peer, centralized, or distributed), strategies (e.g., role-based or model-based), and coordination protocols. Through a review of existing methodologies, our findings serve as a foundation for demystifying and advancing LLM-based MASs toward more intelligent and collaborative solutions for complex, real-world use cases. In addition, various applications of MASs across diverse domains, including 5G/6G networks, Industry 5.0, question answering, and social and cultural settings, are also investigated, demonstrating their wider adoption and broader impacts. Finally, we identify key lessons learned, open challenges, and potential research directions of MASs towards artificial collective intelligence.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 10

Multi-Task Multi-Agent Shared Layers are Universal Cognition of Multi-Agent Coordination

Multi-agent reinforcement learning shines as the pinnacle of multi-agent systems, conquering intricate real-world challenges, fostering collaboration and coordination among agents, and unleashing the potential for intelligent decision-making across domains. However, training a multi-agent reinforcement learning network is a formidable endeavor, demanding substantial computational resources to interact with diverse environmental variables, extract state representations, and acquire decision-making knowledge. The recent breakthroughs in large-scale pre-trained models ignite our curiosity: Can we uncover shared knowledge in multi-agent reinforcement learning and leverage pre-trained models to expedite training for future tasks? Addressing this issue, we present an innovative multi-task learning approach that aims to extract and harness common decision-making knowledge, like cooperation and competition, across different tasks. Our approach involves concurrent training of multiple multi-agent tasks, with each task employing independent front-end perception layers while sharing back-end decision-making layers. This effective decoupling of state representation extraction from decision-making allows for more efficient training and better transferability. To evaluate the efficacy of our proposed approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments in two distinct environments: the StarCraft Multi-agent Challenge (SMAC) and the Google Research Football (GRF) environments. The experimental results unequivocally demonstrate the smooth transferability of the shared decision-making network to other tasks, thereby significantly reducing training costs and improving final performance. Furthermore, visualizations authenticate the presence of general multi-agent decision-making knowledge within the shared network layers, further validating the effectiveness of our approach.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 25, 2023

MetaGPT: Meta Programming for Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework

Recently, remarkable progress has been made in automated task-solving through the use of multi-agent driven by large language models (LLMs). However, existing LLM-based multi-agent works primarily focus on solving simple dialogue tasks, and complex tasks are rarely studied, mainly due to the LLM hallucination problem. This type of hallucination becomes cascading when naively chaining multiple intelligent agents, resulting in a failure to effectively address complex problems. Therefore, we introduce MetaGPT, an innovative framework that incorporates efficient human workflows as a meta programming approach into LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. Specifically, MetaGPT encodes Standardized Operating Procedures (SOPs) into prompts to enhance structured coordination. Subsequently, it mandates modular outputs, empowering agents with domain expertise comparable to human professionals, to validate outputs and minimize compounded errors. In this way, MetaGPT leverages the assembly line paradigm to assign diverse roles to various agents, thereby establishing a framework that can effectively and cohesively deconstruct complex multi-agent collaborative problems. Our experiments on collaborative software engineering benchmarks demonstrate that MetaGPT generates more coherent and correct solutions compared to existing chat-based multi-agent systems. This highlights the potential of integrating human domain knowledge into multi-agent systems, thereby creating new opportunities to tackle complex real-world challenges. The GitHub repository of this project is publicly available on:https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 1, 2023

Federation of Agents: A Semantics-Aware Communication Fabric for Large-Scale Agentic AI

We present Federation of Agents (FoA), a distributed orchestration framework that transforms static multi-agent coordination into dynamic, capability-driven collaboration. FoA introduces Versioned Capability Vectors (VCVs): machine-readable profiles that make agent capabilities searchable through semantic embeddings, enabling agents to advertise their capabilities, cost, and limitations. Our aarchitecturecombines three key innovations: (1) semantic routing that matches tasks to agents over sharded HNSW indices while enforcing operational constraints through cost-biased optimization, (2) dynamic task decomposition where compatible agents collaboratively break down complex tasks into DAGs of subtasks through consensus-based merging, and (3) smart clustering that groups agents working on similar subtasks into collaborative channels for k-round refinement before synthesis. Built on top of MQTT,s publish-subscribe semantics for scalable message passing, FoA achieves sub-linear complexity through hierarchical capability matching and efficient index maintenance. Evaluation on HealthBench shows 13x improvements over single-model baselines, with clustering-enhanced laboration particularly effective for complex reasoning tasks requiring multiple perspectives. The system scales horizontally while maintaining consistent performance, demonstrating that semantic orchestration with structured collaboration can unlock the collective intelligence of heterogeneous federations of AI agents.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 24

AgentOrchestra: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for General-Purpose Task Solving

Recent advances in agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving both general-purpose and highly complex tasks. However, most current models lack mechanisms for coordinating specialized agents and have limited ability to generalize to new or diverse domains. To this end, we introduce AgentOrchestra, a hierarchical multi-agent framework for general-purpose task solving that integrates high-level planning with modular agent collaboration. Drawing inspiration from a conductor orchestrating a symphony, and grounded in the principles of extensibility, multimodality, modularity, and coordination, it features a central planning agent that decomposes complex objectives and delegates sub-tasks to a team of specialized agents. Each sub-agent is equipped with general programming tools, as well as abilities to tackle a wide range of real-world specific tasks, including data analysis, file operations, web navigation, and interactive reasoning in dynamic multimodal environments. Notably, AgentOrchestra introduces an MCP Manager Agent that enables intelligent evolution through dynamic tool creation, retrieval, and reuse mechanisms, significantly enhancing the system's adaptability and scalability. AgentOrchestra supports flexible orchestration through explicit sub-goal formulation, inter-agent communication, and adaptive role allocation. We evaluate the framework on three widely used benchmarks for assessing LLM-based agent systems. Experimental results show that AgentOrchestra consistently outperforms flat-agent and monolithic baselines in terms of task success rate and adaptability. On the GAIA benchmark testing dataset, AgentOrchestra achieves an average score of 83.39\%, ranking among the top general-purpose agents. These results highlight the effectiveness of hierarchical organization and role specialization in building scalable and general-purpose LLM-based agent systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14

Learning Meta Representations for Agents in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, the behaviors that agents learn in a single Markov Game (MG) are typically confined to the given agent number. Every single MG induced by varying the population may possess distinct optimal joint strategies and game-specific knowledge, which are modeled independently in modern multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms. In this work, our focus is on creating agents that can generalize across population-varying MGs. Instead of learning a unimodal policy, each agent learns a policy set comprising effective strategies across a variety of games. To achieve this, we propose Meta Representations for Agents (MRA) that explicitly models the game-common and game-specific strategic knowledge. By representing the policy sets with multi-modal latent policies, the game-common strategic knowledge and diverse strategic modes are discovered through an iterative optimization procedure. We prove that by approximately maximizing the resulting constrained mutual information objective, the policies can reach Nash Equilibrium in every evaluation MG when the latent space is sufficiently large. When deploying MRA in practical settings with limited latent space sizes, fast adaptation can be achieved by leveraging the first-order gradient information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MRA in improving training performance and generalization ability in challenging evaluation games.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 30, 2021

Multi-Agent Deep Research: Training Multi-Agent Systems with M-GRPO

Multi-agent systems perform well on general reasoning tasks. However, the lack of training in specialized areas hinders their accuracy. Current training methods train a unified large language model (LLM) for all agents in the system. This may limit the performances due to different distributions underlying for different agents. Therefore, training multi-agent systems with distinct LLMs should be the next step to solve. However, this approach introduces optimization challenges. For example, agents operate at different frequencies, rollouts involve varying sub-agent invocations, and agents are often deployed across separate servers, disrupting end-to-end gradient flow. To address these issues, we propose M-GRPO, a hierarchical extension of Group Relative Policy Optimization designed for vertical Multi-agent systems with a main agent (planner) and multiple sub-agents (multi-turn tool executors). M-GRPO computes group-relative advantages for both main and sub-agents, maintaining hierarchical credit assignment. It also introduces a trajectory-alignment scheme that generates fixed-size batches despite variable sub-agent invocations. We deploy a decoupled training pipeline in which agents run on separate servers and exchange minimal statistics via a shared store. This enables scalable training without cross-server backpropagation. In experiments on real-world benchmarks (e.g., GAIA, XBench-DeepSearch, and WebWalkerQA), M-GRPO consistently outperforms both single-agent GRPO and multi-agent GRPO with frozen sub-agents, demonstrating improved stability and sample efficiency. These results show that aligning heterogeneous trajectories and decoupling optimization across specialized agents enhances tool-augmented reasoning tasks.

AQ-MedAI AQ
·
Nov 17 2

Stochastic Self-Organization in Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to solve tasks that are beyond the reach of any single LLM. However, this potential can only be realized when the collaboration mechanism between agents is optimized. Specifically, optimizing the communication structure between agents is critical for fruitful collaboration. Most existing approaches rely on fixed topologies, pretrained graph generators, optimization over edges, or employ external LLM judges, thereby adding to the complexity. In this work, we introduce a response-conditioned framework that adapts communication on-the-fly. Agents independently generate responses to the user query and assess peer contributions using an approximation of the Shapley value. A directed acyclic graph (DAG) is then constructed to regulate the propagation of the responses among agents, which ensures stable and efficient message transmission from high-contributing agents to others. This graph is dynamically updated based on the agent responses from the previous collaboration round. Since the proposed framework enables the self-organization of agents without additional supervision or training, we refer to it as SelfOrg. The SelfOrg framework goes beyond task- and query-level optimization and takes into account the stochastic nature of agent responses. Experiments with both strong and weak LLM backends demonstrate robust performance, with significant gains in the weak regime where prior methods collapse. We also theoretically show that multiple agents increase the chance of correctness and that the correct responses naturally dominate the information flow.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 1

Dynamic population-based meta-learning for multi-agent communication with natural language

In this work, our goal is to train agents that can coordinate with seen, unseen as well as human partners in a multi-agent communication environment involving natural language. Previous work using a single set of agents has shown great progress in generalizing to known partners, however it struggles when coordinating with unfamiliar agents. To mitigate that, recent work explored the use of population-based approaches, where multiple agents interact with each other with the goal of learning more generic protocols. These methods, while able to result in good coordination between unseen partners, still only achieve so in cases of simple languages, thus failing to adapt to human partners using natural language. We attribute this to the use of static populations and instead propose a dynamic population-based meta-learning approach that builds such a population in an iterative manner. We perform a holistic evaluation of our method on two different referential games, and show that our agents outperform all prior work when communicating with seen partners and humans. Furthermore, we analyze the natural language generation skills of our agents, where we find that our agents also outperform strong baselines. Finally, we test the robustness of our agents when communicating with out-of-population agents and carefully test the importance of each component of our method through ablation studies.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 27, 2021

Internet of Agents: Weaving a Web of Heterogeneous Agents for Collaborative Intelligence

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for the development of highly capable autonomous agents. However, existing multi-agent frameworks often struggle with integrating diverse capable third-party agents due to reliance on agents defined within their own ecosystems. They also face challenges in simulating distributed environments, as most frameworks are limited to single-device setups. Furthermore, these frameworks often rely on hard-coded communication pipelines, limiting their adaptability to dynamic task requirements. Inspired by the concept of the Internet, we propose the Internet of Agents (IoA), a novel framework that addresses these limitations by providing a flexible and scalable platform for LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. IoA introduces an agent integration protocol, an instant-messaging-like architecture design, and dynamic mechanisms for agent teaming and conversation flow control. Through extensive experiments on general assistant tasks, embodied AI tasks, and retrieval-augmented generation benchmarks, we demonstrate that IoA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing its ability to facilitate effective collaboration among heterogeneous agents. IoA represents a step towards linking diverse agents in an Internet-like environment, where agents can seamlessly collaborate to achieve greater intelligence and capabilities. Our codebase has been released at https://github.com/OpenBMB/IoA.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 9, 2024 4

Harnessing Multi-Agent LLMs for Complex Engineering Problem-Solving: A Framework for Senior Design Projects

Multi-Agent Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining significant attention for their ability to harness collective intelligence in complex problem-solving, decision-making, and planning tasks. This aligns with the concept of the wisdom of crowds, where diverse agents contribute collectively to generating effective solutions, making it particularly suitable for educational settings. Senior design projects, also known as capstone or final year projects, are pivotal in engineering education as they integrate theoretical knowledge with practical application, fostering critical thinking, teamwork, and real-world problem-solving skills. In this paper, we explore the use of Multi-Agent LLMs in supporting these senior design projects undertaken by engineering students, which often involve multidisciplinary considerations and conflicting objectives, such as optimizing technical performance while addressing ethical, social, and environmental concerns. We propose a framework where distinct LLM agents represent different expert perspectives, such as problem formulation agents, system complexity agents, societal and ethical agents, or project managers, thus facilitating a holistic problem-solving approach. This implementation leverages standard multi-agent system (MAS) concepts such as coordination, cooperation, and negotiation, incorporating prompt engineering to develop diverse personas for each agent. These agents engage in rich, collaborative dialogues to simulate human engineering teams, guided by principles from swarm AI to efficiently balance individual contributions towards a unified solution. We adapt these techniques to create a collaboration structure for LLM agents, encouraging interdisciplinary reasoning and negotiation similar to real-world senior design projects. To assess the efficacy of this framework, we collected six proposals of engineering and computer science of...

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 2

LLM-Agent-UMF: LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework for Seamless Integration of Multi Active/Passive Core-Agents

The integration of tools in LLM-based agents overcame the difficulties of standalone LLMs and traditional agents' limited capabilities. However, the conjunction of these technologies and the proposed enhancements in several state-of-the-art works followed a non-unified software architecture resulting in a lack of modularity. Indeed, they focused mainly on functionalities and overlooked the definition of the component's boundaries within the agent. This caused terminological and architectural ambiguities between researchers which we addressed in this paper by proposing a unified framework that establishes a clear foundation for LLM-based agents' development from both functional and software architectural perspectives. Our framework, LLM-Agent-UMF (LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework), clearly distinguishes between the different components of an agent, setting LLMs, and tools apart from a newly introduced element: the core-agent, playing the role of the central coordinator of the agent which comprises five modules: planning, memory, profile, action, and security, the latter often neglected in previous works. Differences in the internal structure of core-agents led us to classify them into a taxonomy of passive and active types. Based on this, we proposed different multi-core agent architectures combining unique characteristics of various individual agents. For evaluation purposes, we applied this framework to a selection of state-of-the-art agents, thereby demonstrating its alignment with their functionalities and clarifying the overlooked architectural aspects. Moreover, we thoroughly assessed four of our proposed architectures by integrating distinctive agents into hybrid active/passive core-agents' systems. This analysis provided clear insights into potential improvements and highlighted the challenges involved in the combination of specific agents.

Dracodes Dracodes
·
Sep 17, 2024 3

Learn to Follow: Decentralized Lifelong Multi-agent Pathfinding via Planning and Learning

Multi-agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problem generally asks to find a set of conflict-free paths for a set of agents confined to a graph and is typically solved in a centralized fashion. Conversely, in this work, we investigate the decentralized MAPF setting, when the central controller that posses all the information on the agents' locations and goals is absent and the agents have to sequientially decide the actions on their own without having access to a full state of the environment. We focus on the practically important lifelong variant of MAPF, which involves continuously assigning new goals to the agents upon arrival to the previous ones. To address this complex problem, we propose a method that integrates two complementary approaches: planning with heuristic search and reinforcement learning through policy optimization. Planning is utilized to construct and re-plan individual paths. We enhance our planning algorithm with a dedicated technique tailored to avoid congestion and increase the throughput of the system. We employ reinforcement learning to discover the collision avoidance policies that effectively guide the agents along the paths. The policy is implemented as a neural network and is effectively trained without any reward-shaping or external guidance. We evaluate our method on a wide range of setups comparing it to the state-of-the-art solvers. The results show that our method consistently outperforms the learnable competitors, showing higher throughput and better ability to generalize to the maps that were unseen at the training stage. Moreover our solver outperforms a rule-based one in terms of throughput and is an order of magnitude faster than a state-of-the-art search-based solver.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

LLM-based Multi-Agent Blackboard System for Information Discovery in Data Science

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities in data science, yet their practical deployment is often constrained by the challenge of discovering relevant data within large heterogeneous data lakes. Existing methods struggle with this: single-agent systems are quickly overwhelmed by large, heterogeneous files in the large data lakes, while multi-agent systems designed based on a master-slave paradigm depend on a rigid central controller for task allocation that requires precise knowledge of each sub-agent's capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent communication paradigm inspired by the blackboard architecture for traditional AI models. In this framework, a central agent posts requests to a shared blackboard, and autonomous subordinate agents -- either responsible for a partition of the data lake or general information retrieval -- volunteer to respond based on their capabilities. This design improves scalability and flexibility by eliminating the need for a central coordinator to have prior knowledge of all sub-agents' expertise. We evaluate our method on three benchmarks that require explicit data discovery: KramaBench and modified versions of DS-Bench and DA-Code to incorporate data discovery. Experimental results demonstrate that the blackboard architecture substantially outperforms baselines, including RAG and the master-slave multi-agent paradigm, achieving between 13% to 57% relative improvement in end-to-end task success and up to a 9% relative gain in F1 score for data discovery over the best-performing baselines across both proprietary and open-source LLMs. Our findings establish the blackboard paradigm as a scalable and generalizable communication framework for multi-agent systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 30

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 3

The Collaboration Gap

The trajectory of AI development suggests that we will increasingly rely on agent-based systems composed of independently developed agents with different information, privileges, and tools. The success of these systems will critically depend on effective collaboration among these heterogeneous agents, even under partial observability. Despite intense interest, few empirical studies have evaluated such agent-agent collaboration at scale. We propose a collaborative maze-solving benchmark that (i) isolates collaborative capabilities, (ii) modulates problem complexity, (iii) enables scalable automated grading, and (iv) imposes no output-format constraints, preserving ecological plausibility. Using this framework, we evaluate 32 leading open- and closed-source models in solo, homogeneous, and heterogeneous pairings. Our results reveal a "collaboration gap": models that perform well solo often degrade substantially when required to collaborate. Collaboration can break down dramatically; for instance, small distilled models that solve mazes well alone may fail almost completely in certain pairings. We find that starting with the stronger agent often improves outcomes, motivating a "relay inference" approach where the stronger agent leads before handing off to the weaker one, closing much of the gap. Our findings argue for (1) collaboration-aware evaluation, (2) training strategies developed to enhance collaborative capabilities, and (3) interaction design that reliably elicits agents' latent skills, guidance that applies to AI-AI and human-AI collaboration.

MasHost Builds It All: Autonomous Multi-Agent System Directed by Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven Multi-agent systems (Mas) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling complex real-world tasks. However, existing Mas construction methods typically rely on manually crafted interaction mechanisms or heuristic rules, introducing human biases and constraining the autonomous ability. Even with recent advances in adaptive Mas construction, existing systems largely remain within the paradigm of semi-autonomous patterns. In this work, we propose MasHost, a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based framework for autonomous and query-adaptive Mas design. By formulating Mas construction as a graph search problem, our proposed MasHost jointly samples agent roles and their interactions through a unified probabilistic sampling mechanism. Beyond the accuracy and efficiency objectives pursued in prior works, we introduce component rationality as an additional and novel design principle in Mas. To achieve this multi-objective optimization, we propose Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization (HRPO), a novel RL strategy that collaboratively integrates group-relative advantages and action-wise rewards. To our knowledge, our proposed MasHost is the first RL-driven framework for autonomous Mas graph construction. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that MasHost consistently outperforms most competitive baselines, validating its effectiveness, efficiency, and structure rationality.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10

Communication Learning in Multi-Agent Systems from Graph Modeling Perspective

In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 1, 2024