Daily Papers

While Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is increasingly expanding more areas of application, little has been applied to make deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) more comprehensible. As RL becomes ubiquitous and used in critical and general public applications, it is essential to develop methods that make it better understood and more interpretable. This study proposes a novel approach to explain cooperative strategies in multiagent RL using Shapley values, a game theory concept used in XAI that successfully explains the rationale behind decisions taken by Machine Learning algorithms. Through testing common assumptions of this technique in two cooperation-centered socially challenging multi-agent environments environments, this article argues that Shapley values are a pertinent way to evaluate the contribution of players in a cooperative multi-agent RL context. To palliate the high overhead of this method, Shapley values are approximated using Monte Carlo sampling. Experimental results on Multiagent Particle and Sequential Social Dilemmas show that Shapley values succeed at estimating the contribution of each agent. These results could have implications that go beyond games in economics, (e.g., for non-discriminatory decision making, ethical and responsible AI-derived decisions or policy making under fairness constraints). They also expose how Shapley values only give general explanations about a model and cannot explain a single run, episode nor justify precise actions taken by agents. Future work should focus on addressing these critical aspects.

Multi-agent football poses an unsolved challenge in AI research. Existing work has focused on tackling simplified scenarios of the game, or else leveraging expert demonstrations. In this paper, we develop a multi-agent system to play the full 11 vs. 11 game mode, without demonstrations. This game mode contains aspects that present major challenges to modern reinforcement learning algorithms; multi-agent coordination, long-term planning, and non-transitivity. To address these challenges, we present TiZero; a self-evolving, multi-agent system that learns from scratch. TiZero introduces several innovations, including adaptive curriculum learning, a novel self-play strategy, and an objective that optimizes the policies of multiple agents jointly. Experimentally, it outperforms previous systems by a large margin on the Google Research Football environment, increasing win rates by over 30%. To demonstrate the generality of TiZero's innovations, they are assessed on several environments beyond football; Overcooked, Multi-agent Particle-Environment, Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect-Four.

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.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been shown effective for cooperative games in recent years. However, existing state-of-the-art methods face challenges related to sample complexity, training instability, and the risk of converging to a suboptimal Nash Equilibrium. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for learning stochastic policies to resolve these issues. We embed cooperative MARL problems into probabilistic graphical models, from which we derive the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) objective for MARL. Based on the MaxEnt framework, we propose Heterogeneous-Agent Soft Actor-Critic (HASAC) algorithm. Theoretically, we prove the monotonic improvement and convergence to quantal response equilibrium (QRE) properties of HASAC. Furthermore, we generalize a unified template for MaxEnt algorithmic design named Maximum Entropy Heterogeneous-Agent Mirror Learning (MEHAML), which provides any induced method with the same guarantees as HASAC. We evaluate HASAC on six benchmarks: Bi-DexHands, Multi-Agent MuJoCo, StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge, Google Research Football, Multi-Agent Particle Environment, and Light Aircraft Game. Results show that HASAC consistently outperforms strong baselines, exhibiting better sample efficiency, robustness, and sufficient exploration.

Autonomous agents empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have undergone significant improvements, enabling them to generalize across a broad spectrum of tasks. However, in real-world scenarios, cooperation among individuals is often required to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of task accomplishment. Hence, inspired by human group dynamics, we propose a multi-agent framework \framework that can collaboratively and dynamically adjust its composition as a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts system. Our experiments demonstrate that \framework framework can effectively deploy multi-agent groups that outperform a single agent. Furthermore, we delve into the emergence of social behaviors among individual agents within a group during collaborative task accomplishment. In view of these behaviors, we discuss some possible strategies to leverage positive ones and mitigate negative ones for improving the collaborative potential of multi-agent groups. Our codes for \framework will soon be released at https://github.com/OpenBMB/AgentVerse.

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.

In an era where single large language models have dominated the landscape of artificial intelligence for years, multi-agent systems arise as new protagonists in conversational task-solving. While previous studies have showcased their potential in reasoning tasks and creative endeavors, an analysis of their limitations concerning the conversational paradigms and the impact of individual agents is missing. It remains unascertained how multi-agent discussions perform across tasks of varying complexity and how the structure of these conversations influences the process. To fill that gap, this work systematically evaluates multi-agent systems across various discussion paradigms, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in both generative tasks and question-answering tasks. Alongside the experiments, I propose a taxonomy of 20 multi-agent research studies from 2022 to 2024, followed by the introduction of a framework for deploying multi-agent LLMs in conversational task-solving. I demonstrate that while multi-agent systems excel in complex reasoning tasks, outperforming a single model by leveraging expert personas, they fail on basic tasks. Concretely, I identify three challenges that arise: 1) While longer discussions enhance reasoning, agents fail to maintain conformity to strict task requirements, which leads to problem drift, making shorter conversations more effective for basic tasks. 2) Prolonged discussions risk alignment collapse, raising new safety concerns for these systems. 3) I showcase discussion monopolization through long generations, posing the problem of fairness in decision-making for tasks like summarization. This work uncovers both the potential and challenges that arise with multi-agent interaction and varying conversational paradigms, providing insights into how future research could improve the efficiency, performance, and safety of multi-agent LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled remarkable advances in automated task-solving with multi-agent systems. However, most existing LLM-based multi-agent approaches rely on predefined agents to handle simple tasks, limiting the adaptability of multi-agent collaboration to different scenarios. Therefore, we introduce AutoAgents, an innovative framework that adaptively generates and coordinates multiple specialized agents to build an AI team according to different tasks. Specifically, AutoAgents couples the relationship between tasks and roles by dynamically generating multiple required agents based on task content and planning solutions for the current task based on the generated expert agents. Multiple specialized agents collaborate with each other to efficiently accomplish tasks. Concurrently, an observer role is incorporated into the framework to reflect on the designated plans and agents' responses and improve upon them. Our experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that AutoAgents generates more coherent and accurate solutions than the existing multi-agent methods. This underscores the significance of assigning different roles to different tasks and of team cooperation, offering new perspectives for tackling complex tasks. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/Link-AGI/AutoAgents.

This paper proposes a novel problem: vision-based perception to learn and predict the collective dynamics of multi-agent systems, specifically focusing on interaction strength and convergence time. Multi-agent systems are defined as collections of more than ten interacting agents that exhibit complex group behaviors. Unlike prior studies that assume knowledge of agent positions, we focus on deep learning models to directly predict collective dynamics from visual data, captured as frames or events. Due to the lack of relevant datasets, we create a simulated dataset using a state-of-the-art flocking simulator, coupled with a vision-to-event conversion framework. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of event-based representation over traditional frame-based methods in predicting these collective behaviors. Based on our analysis, we present event-based vision for Multi-Agent dynamic Prediction (evMAP), a deep learning architecture designed for real-time, accurate understanding of interaction strength and collective behavior emergence in multi-agent systems.

Multi-party Conversational Agents (MPCAs) are systems designed to engage in dialogue with more than two participants simultaneously. Unlike traditional two-party agents, designing MPCAs faces additional challenges due to the need to interpret both utterance semantics and social dynamics. This survey explores recent progress in MPCAs by addressing three key questions: 1) Can agents model each participants' mental states? (State of Mind Modeling); 2) Can they properly understand the dialogue content? (Semantic Understanding); and 3) Can they reason about and predict future conversation flow? (Agent Action Modeling). We review methods ranging from classical machine learning to Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal systems. Our analysis underscores Theory of Mind (ToM) as essential for building intelligent MPCAs and highlights multi-modal understanding as a promising yet underexplored direction. Finally, this survey offers guidance to future researchers on developing more capable MPCAs.

We study the emergence of agency from scratch by using Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. In previous studies of LLM-based agents, each agent's characteristics, including personality and memory, have traditionally been predefined. We focused on how individuality, such as behavior, personality, and memory, can be differentiated from an undifferentiated state. The present LLM agents engage in cooperative communication within a group simulation, exchanging context-based messages in natural language. By analyzing this multi-agent simulation, we report valuable new insights into how social norms, cooperation, and personality traits can emerge spontaneously. This paper demonstrates that autonomously interacting LLM-powered agents generate hallucinations and hashtags to sustain communication, which, in turn, increases the diversity of words within their interactions. Each agent's emotions shift through communication, and as they form communities, the personalities of the agents emerge and evolve accordingly. This computational modeling approach and its findings will provide a new method for analyzing collective artificial intelligence.

For a long time, humanity has pursued artificial intelligence (AI) equivalent to or surpassing the human level, with AI agents considered a promising vehicle for this pursuit. AI agents are artificial entities that sense their environment, make decisions, and take actions. Many efforts have been made to develop intelligent AI agents since the mid-20th century. However, these efforts have mainly focused on advancement in algorithms or training strategies to enhance specific capabilities or performance on particular tasks. Actually, what the community lacks is a sufficiently general and powerful model to serve as a starting point for designing AI agents that can adapt to diverse scenarios. Due to the versatile and remarkable capabilities they demonstrate, large language models (LLMs) are regarded as potential sparks for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), offering hope for building general AI agents. Many research efforts have leveraged LLMs as the foundation to build AI agents and have achieved significant progress. We start by tracing the concept of agents from its philosophical origins to its development in AI, and explain why LLMs are suitable foundations for AI agents. Building upon this, we present a conceptual framework for LLM-based agents, comprising three main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework can be tailored to suit different applications. Subsequently, we explore the extensive applications of LLM-based agents in three aspects: single-agent scenarios, multi-agent scenarios, and human-agent cooperation. Following this, we delve into agent societies, exploring the behavior and personality of LLM-based agents, the social phenomena that emerge when they form societies, and the insights they offer for human society. Finally, we discuss a range of key topics and open problems within the field.

Multi-agent systems commonly distribute tasks among specialized, autonomous agents, yet they often lack mechanisms to replace or reassign underperforming agents in real time. Inspired by the free-agency model of Major League Baseball, the Reinforcement Learning Free Agent (RLFA) algorithm introduces a reward-based mechanism to detect and remove agents exhibiting persistent underperformance and seamlessly insert more capable ones. Each agent internally uses a mixture-of-experts (MoE) approach, delegating incoming tasks to specialized sub-models under the guidance of a gating function. A primary use case is fraud detection, where RLFA promptly swaps out an agent whose detection accuracy dips below a preset threshold. A new agent is tested in a probationary mode, and upon demonstrating superior performance, fully replaces the underperformer. This dynamic, free-agency cycle ensures sustained accuracy, quicker adaptation to emerging threats, and minimal disruption to ongoing operations. By continually refreshing its roster of agents, the system fosters ongoing improvements and more resilient collaboration in multi-agent Generative AI environments.

This paper explores existing works of multi-agent systems and identifies challenges that remain inadequately addressed. By leveraging the diverse capabilities and roles of individual agents within a multi-agent system, these systems can tackle complex tasks through collaboration. We discuss optimizing task allocation, fostering robust reasoning through iterative debates, managing complex and layered context information, and enhancing memory management to support the intricate interactions within multi-agent systems. We also explore the potential application of multi-agent systems in blockchain systems to shed light on their future development and application in real-world distributed systems.

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved success in various domains. However, multi-agent RL (MARL) remains a challenge in terms of decentralization, partial observability and scalability to many agents. Meanwhile, collective behavior requires resolution of the aforementioned challenges, and remains of importance to many state-of-the-art applications such as active matter physics, self-organizing systems, opinion dynamics, and biological or robotic swarms. Here, MARL via mean field control (MFC) offers a potential solution to scalability, but fails to consider decentralized and partially observable systems. In this paper, we enable decentralized behavior of agents under partial information by proposing novel models for decentralized partially observable MFC (Dec-POMFC), a broad class of problems with permutation-invariant agents allowing for reduction to tractable single-agent Markov decision processes (MDP) with single-agent RL solution. We provide rigorous theoretical results, including a dynamic programming principle, together with optimality guarantees for Dec-POMFC solutions applied to finite swarms of interest. Algorithmically, we propose Dec-POMFC-based policy gradient methods for MARL via centralized training and decentralized execution, together with policy gradient approximation guarantees. In addition, we improve upon state-of-the-art histogram-based MFC by kernel methods, which is of separate interest also for fully observable MFC. We evaluate numerically on representative collective behavior tasks such as adapted Kuramoto and Vicsek swarming models, being on par with state-of-the-art MARL. Overall, our framework takes a step towards RL-based engineering of artificial collective behavior via MFC.

Agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to understand the behavior of complex systems by simulating a collection of agents that act and interact within an environment. Their practical utility requires capturing realistic environment dynamics and adaptive agent behavior while efficiently simulating million-size populations. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to enhance ABMs by using LLMs as agents with further potential to capture adaptive behavior. However, the computational infeasibility of using LLMs for large populations has hindered their widespread adoption. In this paper, we introduce AgentTorch -- a framework that scales ABMs to millions of agents while capturing high-resolution agent behavior using LLMs. We benchmark the utility of LLMs as ABM agents, exploring the trade-off between simulation scale and individual agency. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate how AgentTorch can simulate 8.4 million agents representing New York City, capturing the impact of isolation and employment behavior on health and economic outcomes. We compare the performance of different agent architectures based on heuristic and LLM agents in predicting disease waves and unemployment rates. Furthermore, we showcase AgentTorch's capabilities for retrospective, counterfactual, and prospective analyses, highlighting how adaptive agent behavior can help overcome the limitations of historical data in policy design. AgentTorch is an open-source project actively being used for policy-making and scientific discovery around the world. The framework is available here: github.com/AgentTorch/AgentTorch.

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.

Multi-agent AI systems can be used for simulating collective decision-making in scientific and practical applications. They can also be used to introduce a diverse group discussion step in chatbot pipelines, enhancing the cultural sensitivity of the chatbot's responses. These applications, however, are predicated on the ability of AI agents to reliably adopt assigned personas and mimic human interactions. To see whether LLM agents satisfy these requirements, we examine AI agent ensembles engaged in cross-national collaboration and debate by analyzing their private responses and chat transcripts. Our findings suggest that multi-agent discussions can support collective AI decisions that more often reflect diverse perspectives, yet this effect is tempered by the agents' susceptibility to conformity due to perceived peer pressure and occasional challenges in maintaining consistent personas and opinions. Instructions that encourage debate in support of one's opinions rather than collaboration increase the rate of inconstancy. Without addressing the factors we identify, the full potential of multi-agent frameworks for producing more culturally diverse AI outputs or more realistic simulations of group decision-making may remain untapped.

Cooperation in multi-agent learning (MAL) is a topic at the intersection of numerous disciplines, including game theory, economics, social sciences, and evolutionary biology. Research in this area aims to understand both how agents can coordinate effectively when goals are aligned and how they may cooperate in settings where gains from working together are possible but possibilities for conflict abound. In this paper we provide an overview of the fundamental concepts, problem settings and algorithms of multi-agent learning. This encompasses reinforcement learning, multi-agent sequential decision-making, challenges associated with multi-agent cooperation, and a comprehensive review of recent progress, along with an evaluation of relevant metrics. Finally we discuss open challenges in the field with the aim of inspiring new avenues for research.

Agent-based modeling has been around for decades, and applied widely across the social and natural sciences. The scope of this research method is now poised to grow dramatically as it absorbs the new affordances provided by Large Language Models (LLM)s. Generative Agent-Based Models (GABM) are not just classic Agent-Based Models (ABM)s where the agents talk to one another. Rather, GABMs are constructed using an LLM to apply common sense to situations, act "reasonably", recall common semantic knowledge, produce API calls to control digital technologies like apps, and communicate both within the simulation and to researchers viewing it from the outside. Here we present Concordia, a library to facilitate constructing and working with GABMs. Concordia makes it easy to construct language-mediated simulations of physically- or digitally-grounded environments. Concordia agents produce their behavior using a flexible component system which mediates between two fundamental operations: LLM calls and associative memory retrieval. A special agent called the Game Master (GM), which was inspired by tabletop role-playing games, is responsible for simulating the environment where the agents interact. Agents take actions by describing what they want to do in natural language. The GM then translates their actions into appropriate implementations. In a simulated physical world, the GM checks the physical plausibility of agent actions and describes their effects. In digital environments simulating technologies such as apps and services, the GM may handle API calls to integrate with external tools such as general AI assistants (e.g., Bard, ChatGPT), and digital apps (e.g., Calendar, Email, Search, etc.). Concordia was designed to support a wide array of applications both in scientific research and for evaluating performance of real digital services by simulating users and/or generating synthetic data.

Progress in scientific discovery is rarely the result of a single "Eureka" moment, but is rather the product of hundreds of scientists incrementally working together toward a common goal. While existing agent workflows are capable of producing research autonomously, they do so in isolation, without the ability to continuously improve upon prior research results. To address these challenges, we introduce AgentRxiv-a framework that lets LLM agent laboratories upload and retrieve reports from a shared preprint server in order to collaborate, share insights, and iteratively build on each other's research. We task agent laboratories to develop new reasoning and prompting techniques and find that agents with access to their prior research achieve higher performance improvements compared to agents operating in isolation (11.4% relative improvement over baseline on MATH-500). We find that the best performing strategy generalizes to benchmarks in other domains (improving on average by 3.3%). Multiple agent laboratories sharing research through AgentRxiv are able to work together towards a common goal, progressing more rapidly than isolated laboratories, achieving higher overall accuracy (13.7% relative improvement over baseline on MATH-500). These findings suggest that autonomous agents may play a role in designing future AI systems alongside humans. We hope that AgentRxiv allows agents to collaborate toward research goals and enables researchers to accelerate discovery.

Large Language Model Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) have achieved great progress in solving complex tasks. It performs communication among agents within the system to collaboratively solve tasks, under the premise of shared information. However, when agents' communication is leveraged to enhance human cooperation, a new challenge arises due to information asymmetry, since each agent can only access the information of its human user. Previous MAS struggle to complete tasks under this condition. To address this, we propose a new MAS paradigm termed iAgents, which denotes Informative Multi-Agent Systems. In iAgents, the human social network is mirrored in the agent network, where agents proactively exchange human information necessary for task resolution, thereby overcoming information asymmetry. iAgents employs a novel agent reasoning mechanism, InfoNav, to navigate agents' communication towards effective information exchange. Together with InfoNav, iAgents organizes human information in a mixed memory to provide agents with accurate and comprehensive information for exchange. Additionally, we introduce InformativeBench, the first benchmark tailored for evaluating LLM agents' task-solving ability under information asymmetry. Experimental results show that iAgents can collaborate within a social network of 140 individuals and 588 relationships, autonomously communicate over 30 turns, and retrieve information from nearly 70,000 messages to complete tasks within 3 minutes.

Enabling effective collaboration among LLMs is a crucial step toward developing autonomous systems capable of solving complex problems. While LLMs are typically used as single-model generators, where humans critique and refine their outputs, the potential for jointly-trained collaborative models remains largely unexplored. Despite promising results in multi-agent communication and debate settings, little progress has been made in training models to work together on tasks. In this paper, we present a first step toward "Multi-agent LLM training" (MALT) on reasoning problems. Our approach employs a sequential multi-agent setup with heterogeneous LLMs assigned specialized roles: a generator, verifier, and refinement model iteratively solving problems. We propose a trajectory-expansion-based synthetic data generation process and a credit assignment strategy driven by joint outcome based rewards. This enables our post-training setup to utilize both positive and negative trajectories to autonomously improve each model's specialized capabilities as part of a joint sequential system. We evaluate our approach across MATH, GSM8k, and CQA, where MALT on Llama 3.1 8B models achieves relative improvements of 14.14%, 7.12%, and 9.40% respectively over the same baseline model. This demonstrates an early advance in multi-agent cooperative capabilities for performance on mathematical and common sense reasoning questions. More generally, our work provides a concrete direction for research around multi-agent LLM training approaches.

Progress in multiagent intelligence research is fundamentally limited by the number and quality of environments available for study. In recent years, simulated games have become a dominant research platform within reinforcement learning, in part due to their accessibility and interpretability. Previous works have targeted and demonstrated success on arcade, first person shooter (FPS), real-time strategy (RTS), and massive online battle arena (MOBA) games. Our work considers massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs or MMOs), which capture several complexities of real-world learning that are not well modeled by any other game genre. We present Neural MMO, a massively multiagent game environment inspired by MMOs and discuss our progress on two more general challenges in multiagent systems engineering for AI research: distributed infrastructure and game IO. We further demonstrate that standard policy gradient methods and simple baseline models can learn interesting emergent exploration and specialization behaviors in this setting.

The rapid advancement of scientific progress requires innovative tools that can accelerate discovery. While recent AI methods, particularly large language models (LLMs), have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, they fall short in replicating the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices, where diverse teams of experts work together to tackle complex problems. To address the limitation, we propose an LLM-based multi-agent system, i.e., Virtual Scientists (VirSci), designed to mimic the teamwork inherent in scientific research. VirSci organizes a team of agents to collaboratively generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that this multi-agent approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing novel and impactful scientific ideas, showing potential in aligning with key insights in the Science of Science field. Our findings suggest that integrating collaborative agents can lead to more innovative scientific outputs, offering a robust system for autonomous scientific discovery.

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.

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a fundamental problem in robotics that asks us to compute collision-free paths for a team of agents, all moving across a shared map. Although many works appear on this topic, all current algorithms struggle as the number of agents grows. The principal reason is that existing approaches typically plan free-flow optimal paths, which creates congestion. To tackle this issue, we propose a new approach for MAPF where agents are guided to their destination by following congestion-avoiding paths. We evaluate the idea in two large-scale settings: one-shot MAPF, where each agent has a single destination, and lifelong MAPF, where agents are continuously assigned new destinations. Empirically, we report large improvements in solution quality for one-short MAPF and in overall throughput for lifelong MAPF.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) utilizing multiple Large Language Model agents with Retrieval Augmented Generation and that can execute code locally may become beneficial in cosmological data analysis. Here, we illustrate a first small step towards AI-assisted analyses and a glimpse of the potential of MAS to automate and optimize scientific workflows in Cosmology. The system architecture of our example package, that builds upon the autogen/ag2 framework, can be applied to MAS in any area of quantitative scientific research. The particular task we apply our methods to is the cosmological parameter analysis of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope lensing power spectrum likelihood using Monte Carlo Markov Chains. Our work-in-progress code is open source and available at https://github.com/CMBAgents/cmbagent.

Recent advancements in large foundation models have remarkably enhanced our understanding of sensory information in open-world environments. In leveraging the power of foundation models, it is crucial for AI research to pivot away from excessive reductionism and toward an emphasis on systems that function as cohesive wholes. Specifically, we emphasize developing Agent AI -- an embodied system that integrates large foundation models into agent actions. The emerging field of Agent AI spans a wide range of existing embodied and agent-based multimodal interactions, including robotics, gaming, and healthcare systems, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel large action model to achieve embodied intelligent behavior, the Agent Foundation Model. On top of this idea, we discuss how agent AI exhibits remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Furthermore, we discuss the potential of Agent AI from an interdisciplinary perspective, underscoring AI cognition and consciousness within scientific discourse. We believe that those discussions serve as a basis for future research directions and encourage broader societal engagement.

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.

The Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problem involves finding a set of conflict-free paths for a group of agents confined to a graph. In typical MAPF scenarios, the graph and the agents' starting and ending vertices are known beforehand, allowing the use of centralized planning algorithms. However, in this study, we focus on the decentralized MAPF setting, where the agents may observe the other agents only locally and are restricted in communications with each other. Specifically, we investigate the lifelong variant of MAPF, where new goals are continually assigned to the agents upon completion of previous ones. Drawing inspiration from the successful AlphaZero approach, we propose a decentralized multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method for MAPF tasks. Our approach utilizes the agent's observations to recreate the intrinsic Markov decision process, which is then used for planning with a tailored for multi-agent tasks version of neural MCTS. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learnable MAPF solvers. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/mats-lp.

Building AIs with adaptive behaviors in human-AI cooperation stands as a pivotal focus in AGI research. Current methods for developing cooperative agents predominantly rely on learning-based methods, where policy generalization heavily hinges on past interactions with specific teammates. These approaches constrain the agent's capacity to recalibrate its strategy when confronted with novel teammates. We propose ProAgent, a novel framework that harnesses large language models (LLMs) to fashion a proactive agent empowered with the ability to anticipate teammates' forthcoming decisions and formulate enhanced plans for itself. ProAgent excels at cooperative reasoning with the capacity to dynamically adapt its behavior to enhance collaborative efforts with teammates. Moreover, the ProAgent framework exhibits a high degree of modularity and interpretability, facilitating seamless integration to address a wide array of coordination scenarios. Experimental evaluations conducted within the framework of Overcook-AI unveil the remarkable performance superiority of ProAgent, outperforming five methods based on self-play and population-based training in cooperation with AI agents. Further, when cooperating with human proxy models, its performance exhibits an average improvement exceeding 10\% compared to the current state-of-the-art, COLE. The advancement was consistently observed across diverse scenarios involving interactions with both AI agents of varying characteristics and human counterparts. These findings inspire future research for human-robot collaborations. For a hands-on demonstration, please visit https://pku-proagent.github.io.

A key challenge in artificial intelligence is the creation of systems capable of autonomously advancing scientific understanding by exploring novel domains, identifying complex patterns, and uncovering previously unseen connections in vast scientific data. In this work, we present SciAgents, an approach that leverages three core concepts: (1) the use of large-scale ontological knowledge graphs to organize and interconnect diverse scientific concepts, (2) a suite of large language models (LLMs) and data retrieval tools, and (3) multi-agent systems with in-situ learning capabilities. Applied to biologically inspired materials, SciAgents reveals hidden interdisciplinary relationships that were previously considered unrelated, achieving a scale, precision, and exploratory power that surpasses traditional human-driven research methods. The framework autonomously generates and refines research hypotheses, elucidating underlying mechanisms, design principles, and unexpected material properties. By integrating these capabilities in a modular fashion, the intelligent system yields material discoveries, critique and improve existing hypotheses, retrieve up-to-date data about existing research, and highlights their strengths and limitations. Our case studies demonstrate scalable capabilities to combine generative AI, ontological representations, and multi-agent modeling, harnessing a `swarm of intelligence' similar to biological systems. This provides new avenues for materials discovery and accelerates the development of advanced materials by unlocking Nature's design principles.

The booming success of LLMs initiates rapid development in LLM agents. Though the foundation of an LLM agent is the generative model, it is critical to devise the optimal reasoning strategies and agent architectures. Accordingly, LLM agent research advances from the simple chain-of-thought prompting to more complex ReAct and Reflection reasoning strategy; agent architecture also evolves from single agent generation to multi-agent conversation, as well as multi-LLM multi-agent group chat. However, with the existing intricate frameworks and libraries, creating and evaluating new reasoning strategies and agent architectures has become a complex challenge, which hinders research investigation into LLM agents. Thus, we open-source a new AI agent library, AgentLite, which simplifies this process by offering a lightweight, user-friendly platform for innovating LLM agent reasoning, architectures, and applications with ease. AgentLite is a task-oriented framework designed to enhance the ability of agents to break down tasks and facilitate the development of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we introduce multiple practical applications developed with AgentLite to demonstrate its convenience and flexibility. Get started now at: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/AgentLite.

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.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems ( LLM-MAS ) have become a research hotspot since the rise of large language models (LLMs). However, with the continuous influx of new related works, the existing reviews struggle to capture them comprehensively. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these studies. We first discuss the definition of LLM-MAS, a framework encompassing much of previous work. We provide an overview of the various applications of LLM-MAS in (i) solving complex tasks, (ii) simulating specific scenarios, and (iii) evaluating generative agents. Building on previous studies, we also highlight several challenges and propose future directions for research in this field.

Developing intelligent agents for long-term cooperation in dynamic open-world scenarios is a major challenge in multi-agent systems. Traditional Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frameworks like centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) struggle with scalability and flexibility. They require centralized long-term planning, which is difficult without custom reward functions, and face challenges in processing multi-modal data. CTDE approaches also assume fixed cooperation strategies, making them impractical in dynamic environments where agents need to adapt and plan independently. To address decentralized multi-agent cooperation, we propose Decentralized Adaptive Knowledge Graph Memory and Structured Communication System (DAMCS) in a novel Multi-agent Crafter environment. Our generative agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are more scalable than traditional MARL agents by leveraging external knowledge and language for long-term planning and reasoning. Instead of fully sharing information from all past experiences, DAMCS introduces a multi-modal memory system organized as a hierarchical knowledge graph and a structured communication protocol to optimize agent cooperation. This allows agents to reason from past interactions and share relevant information efficiently. Experiments on novel multi-agent open-world tasks show that DAMCS outperforms both MARL and LLM baselines in task efficiency and collaboration. Compared to single-agent scenarios, the two-agent scenario achieves the same goal with 63% fewer steps, and the six-agent scenario with 74% fewer steps, highlighting the importance of adaptive memory and structured communication in achieving long-term goals. We publicly release our project at: https://happyeureka.github.io/damcs.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.

Large language models and autonomous AI agents have evolved rapidly, resulting in a diverse array of evaluation benchmarks, frameworks, and collaboration protocols. However, the landscape remains fragmented and lacks a unified taxonomy or comprehensive survey. Therefore, we present a side-by-side comparison of benchmarks developed between 2019 and 2025 that evaluate these models and agents across multiple domains. In addition, we propose a taxonomy of approximately 60 benchmarks that cover general and academic knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, code generation and software engineering, factual grounding and retrieval, domain-specific evaluations, multimodal and embodied tasks, task orchestration, and interactive assessments. Furthermore, we review AI-agent frameworks introduced between 2023 and 2025 that integrate large language models with modular toolkits to enable autonomous decision-making and multi-step reasoning. Moreover, we present real-world applications of autonomous AI agents in materials science, biomedical research, academic ideation, software engineering, synthetic data generation, chemical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, geographic information systems, multimedia, healthcare, and finance. We then survey key agent-to-agent collaboration protocols, namely the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A). Finally, we discuss recommendations for future research, focusing on advanced reasoning strategies, failure modes in multi-agent LLM systems, automated scientific discovery, dynamic tool integration via reinforcement learning, integrated search capabilities, and security vulnerabilities in agent protocols.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a compelling foundation for building generally-capable AI agents. These agents may soon be deployed at scale in the real world, representing the interests of individual humans (e.g., AI assistants) or groups of humans (e.g., AI-accelerated corporations). At present, relatively little is known about the dynamics of multiple LLM agents interacting over many generations of iterative deployment. In this paper, we examine whether a "society" of LLM agents can learn mutually beneficial social norms in the face of incentives to defect, a distinctive feature of human sociality that is arguably crucial to the success of civilization. In particular, we study the evolution of indirect reciprocity across generations of LLM agents playing a classic iterated Donor Game in which agents can observe the recent behavior of their peers. We find that the evolution of cooperation differs markedly across base models, with societies of Claude 3.5 Sonnet agents achieving significantly higher average scores than Gemini 1.5 Flash, which, in turn, outperforms GPT-4o. Further, Claude 3.5 Sonnet can make use of an additional mechanism for costly punishment to achieve yet higher scores, while Gemini 1.5 Flash and GPT-4o fail to do so. For each model class, we also observe variation in emergent behavior across random seeds, suggesting an understudied sensitive dependence on initial conditions. We suggest that our evaluation regime could inspire an inexpensive and informative new class of LLM benchmarks, focussed on the implications of LLM agent deployment for the cooperative infrastructure of society.

Generative agents that simulate human society show tremendous potential for further research and practical applications. Specifically, the generative agent architecture comprising several meticulously designed modules constitutes the most critical component. To facilitate progress in this research, this report presents our integrated perspective on comprehending generative agents through summarization, since we believe summarization is the most fundamental and indispensable capacity of generative agents manifested across diverse scenarios. We hope this report can provide insight into understanding the importance of summarization capacity in generative agents and motivate future research.

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.

Autonomous agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) offer enormous potential for automation. Early proof of this technology can be found in various demonstrations of agents solving complex tasks, interacting with external systems to augment their knowledge, and triggering actions. In particular, workflows involving multiple agents solving complex tasks in a collaborative fashion exemplify their capacity to operate in less strict and less well-defined environments. Thus, a multi-agent approach has great potential for serving as a backbone in many industrial applications, ranging from complex knowledge retrieval systems to next generation robotic process automation. Given the reasoning abilities within the current generation of LLMs, complex processes require a multi-step approach that includes a plan of well-defined and modular tasks. Depending on the level of complexity, these tasks can be executed either by a single agent or a group of agents. In this work, we focus on designing a flexible agent engineering framework with careful attention to planning and execution, capable of handling complex use case applications across various domains. The proposed framework provides reliability in industrial applications and presents techniques to ensure a scalable, flexible, and collaborative workflow for multiple autonomous agents working together towards solving tasks.

The era of intelligent agents is upon us, driven by revolutionary advancements in large language models. Large Language Model (LLM) agents, with goal-driven behaviors and dynamic adaptation capabilities, potentially represent a critical pathway toward artificial general intelligence. This survey systematically deconstructs LLM agent systems through a methodology-centered taxonomy, linking architectural foundations, collaboration mechanisms, and evolutionary pathways. We unify fragmented research threads by revealing fundamental connections between agent design principles and their emergent behaviors in complex environments. Our work provides a unified architectural perspective, examining how agents are constructed, how they collaborate, and how they evolve over time, while also addressing evaluation methodologies, tool applications, practical challenges, and diverse application domains. By surveying the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field, we offer researchers a structured taxonomy for understanding LLM agents and identify promising directions for future research. The collection is available at https://github.com/luo-junyu/Awesome-Agent-Papers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning, planning, and decision-making. Building upon these strengths, researchers have begun incorporating LLMs into multi-agent systems (MAS), where agents collaborate or compete through natural language interactions to tackle tasks beyond the scope of single-agent setups. In this survey, we present a communication-centric perspective on LLM-based multi-agent systems, examining key system-level features such as architecture design and communication goals, as well as internal mechanisms like communication strategies, paradigms, objects and content. We illustrate how these communication elements interplay to enable collective intelligence and flexible collaboration. Furthermore, we discuss prominent challenges, including scalability, security, and multimodal integration, and propose directions for future work to advance research in this emerging domain. Ultimately, this survey serves as a catalyst for further innovation, fostering more robust, scalable, and intelligent multi-agent systems across diverse application domains.

Despite growing enthusiasm for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to accomplish tasks, their performance gains across popular benchmarks remain minimal compared to single-agent frameworks. This gap highlights the need to analyze the challenges hindering MAS effectiveness. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of MAS challenges. We analyze five popular MAS frameworks across over 150 tasks, involving six expert human annotators. We identify 14 unique failure modes and propose a comprehensive taxonomy applicable to various MAS frameworks. This taxonomy emerges iteratively from agreements among three expert annotators per study, achieving a Cohen's Kappa score of 0.88. These fine-grained failure modes are organized into 3 categories, (i) specification and system design failures, (ii) inter-agent misalignment, and (iii) task verification and termination. To support scalable evaluation, we integrate MASFT with LLM-as-a-Judge. We also explore if identified failures could be easily prevented by proposing two interventions: improved specification of agent roles and enhanced orchestration strategies. Our findings reveal that identified failures require more complex solutions, highlighting a clear roadmap for future research. We open-source our dataset and LLM annotator.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) demonstrates significant progress in solving cooperative and competitive multi-agent problems in various environments. One of the principal challenges in MARL is the need for explicit prediction of the agents' behavior to achieve cooperation. To resolve this issue, we propose the Shared Recurrent Memory Transformer (SRMT) which extends memory transformers to multi-agent settings by pooling and globally broadcasting individual working memories, enabling agents to exchange information implicitly and coordinate their actions. We evaluate SRMT on the Partially Observable Multi-Agent Pathfinding problem in a toy Bottleneck navigation task that requires agents to pass through a narrow corridor and on a POGEMA benchmark set of tasks. In the Bottleneck task, SRMT consistently outperforms a variety of reinforcement learning baselines, especially under sparse rewards, and generalizes effectively to longer corridors than those seen during training. On POGEMA maps, including Mazes, Random, and MovingAI, SRMT is competitive with recent MARL, hybrid, and planning-based algorithms. These results suggest that incorporating shared recurrent memory into the transformer-based architectures can enhance coordination in decentralized multi-agent systems. The source code for training and evaluation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Aloriosa/srmt.

This paper introduces Multi-Agent MDP Homomorphic Networks, a class of networks that allows distributed execution using only local information, yet is able to share experience between global symmetries in the joint state-action space of cooperative multi-agent systems. In cooperative multi-agent systems, complex symmetries arise between different configurations of the agents and their local observations. For example, consider a group of agents navigating: rotating the state globally results in a permutation of the optimal joint policy. Existing work on symmetries in single agent reinforcement learning can only be generalized to the fully centralized setting, because such approaches rely on the global symmetry in the full state-action spaces, and these can result in correspondences across agents. To encode such symmetries while still allowing distributed execution we propose a factorization that decomposes global symmetries into local transformations. Our proposed factorization allows for distributing the computation that enforces global symmetries over local agents and local interactions. We introduce a multi-agent equivariant policy network based on this factorization. We show empirically on symmetric multi-agent problems that globally symmetric distributable policies improve data efficiency compared to non-equivariant baselines.

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.

Leveraging large language models (LLMs), autonomous agents have significantly improved, gaining the ability to handle a variety of tasks. In open-ended settings, optimizing collaboration for efficiency and effectiveness demands flexible adjustments. Despite this, current research mainly emphasizes fixed, task-oriented workflows and overlooks agent-centric organizational structures. Drawing inspiration from human organizational behavior, we introduce a self-organizing agent system (S-Agents) with a "tree of agents" structure for dynamic workflow, an "hourglass agent architecture" for balancing information priorities, and a "non-obstructive collaboration" method to allow asynchronous task execution among agents. This structure can autonomously coordinate a group of agents, efficiently addressing the challenges of an open and dynamic environment without human intervention. Our experiments demonstrate that S-Agents proficiently execute collaborative building tasks and resource collection in the Minecraft environment, validating their effectiveness.

Pioneering advancements in large language model-powered agents have underscored the design pattern of multi-agent collaboration, demonstrating that collective intelligence can surpass the capabilities of each individual. Inspired by the neural scaling law, which posits that increasing neurons leads to emergent abilities, this study investigates whether a similar principle applies to increasing agents in multi-agent collaboration. Technically, we propose multi-agent collaboration networks (MacNet), which utilize directed acyclic graphs to organize agents and streamline their interactive reasoning via topological ordering, with solutions derived from their dialogues. Extensive experiments show that MacNet consistently outperforms baseline models, enabling effective agent collaboration across various network topologies and supporting cooperation among more than a thousand agents. Notably, we observed a small-world collaboration phenomenon, where topologies resembling small-world properties achieved superior performance. Additionally, we identified a collaborative scaling law, indicating that normalized solution quality follows a logistic growth pattern as scaling agents, with collaborative emergence occurring much earlier than previously observed instances of neural emergence. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

Human communication is a complex and diverse process that not only involves multiple factors such as language, commonsense, and cultural backgrounds but also requires the participation of multimodal information, such as speech. Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated promising performance in simulating human society. Can we leverage LLM-based multi-agent systems to simulate human communication? However, current LLM-based multi-agent systems mainly rely on text as the primary medium. In this paper, we propose SpeechAgents, a multi-modal LLM based multi-agent system designed for simulating human communication. SpeechAgents utilizes multi-modal LLM as the control center for individual agent and employes multi-modal signals as the medium for exchanged messages among agents. Additionally, we propose Multi-Agent Tuning to enhance the multi-agent capabilities of LLM without compromising general abilities. To strengthen and evaluate the effectiveness of human communication simulation, we build the Human-Communication Simulation Benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that SpeechAgents can simulate human communication dialogues with consistent content, authentic rhythm, and rich emotions and demonstrate excellent scalability even with up to 25 agents, which can apply to tasks such as drama creation and audio novels generation. Code and models will be open-sourced at https://github. com/0nutation/SpeechAgents

We develop a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) method to learn scalable control policies for target tracking. Our method can handle an arbitrary number of pursuers and targets; we show results for tasks consisting up to 1000 pursuers tracking 1000 targets. We use a decentralized, partially-observable Markov Decision Process framework to model pursuers as agents receiving partial observations (range and bearing) about targets which move using fixed, unknown policies. An attention mechanism is used to parameterize the value function of the agents; this mechanism allows us to handle an arbitrary number of targets. Entropy-regularized off-policy RL methods are used to train a stochastic policy, and we discuss how it enables a hedging behavior between pursuers that leads to a weak form of cooperation in spite of completely decentralized control execution. We further develop a masking heuristic that allows training on smaller problems with few pursuers-targets and execution on much larger problems. Thorough simulation experiments, ablation studies, and comparisons to state of the art algorithms are performed to study the scalability of the approach and robustness of performance to varying numbers of agents and targets.

Open large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, showcasing impressive performance across various tasks.Despite the significant advancements in LLMs, their effective operation still relies heavily on human input to accurately guide the dialogue flow, with agent tuning being a crucial optimization technique that involves human adjustments to the model for better response to such guidance.Addressing this dependency, our work introduces the TinyAgent model, trained on a meticulously curated high-quality dataset. We also present the Collaborative Multi-Agent Tuning (CMAT) framework, an innovative system designed to augment language agent capabilities through adaptive weight updates based on environmental feedback. This framework fosters collaborative learning and real-time adaptation among multiple intelligent agents, enhancing their context-awareness and long-term memory. In this research, we propose a new communication agent framework that integrates multi-agent systems with environmental feedback mechanisms, offering a scalable method to explore cooperative behaviors. Notably, our TinyAgent-7B model exhibits performance on par with GPT-3.5, despite having fewer parameters, signifying a substantial improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of LLMs.

In this work we create agents that can perform well beyond a single, individual task, that exhibit much wider generalisation of behaviour to a massive, rich space of challenges. We define a universe of tasks within an environment domain and demonstrate the ability to train agents that are generally capable across this vast space and beyond. The environment is natively multi-agent, spanning the continuum of competitive, cooperative, and independent games, which are situated within procedurally generated physical 3D worlds. The resulting space is exceptionally diverse in terms of the challenges posed to agents, and as such, even measuring the learning progress of an agent is an open research problem. We propose an iterative notion of improvement between successive generations of agents, rather than seeking to maximise a singular objective, allowing us to quantify progress despite tasks being incomparable in terms of achievable rewards. We show that through constructing an open-ended learning process, which dynamically changes the training task distributions and training objectives such that the agent never stops learning, we achieve consistent learning of new behaviours. The resulting agent is able to score reward in every one of our humanly solvable evaluation levels, with behaviour generalising to many held-out points in the universe of tasks. Examples of this zero-shot generalisation include good performance on Hide and Seek, Capture the Flag, and Tag. Through analysis and hand-authored probe tasks we characterise the behaviour of our agent, and find interesting emergent heuristic behaviours such as trial-and-error experimentation, simple tool use, option switching, and cooperation. Finally, we demonstrate that the general capabilities of this agent could unlock larger scale transfer of behaviour through cheap finetuning.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis is crucial for biological research, as it enables the precise characterization of cellular heterogeneity. However, manual manipulation of various tools to achieve desired outcomes can be labor-intensive for researchers. To address this, we introduce CellAgent (http://cell.agent4science.cn/), an LLM-driven multi-agent framework, specifically designed for the automatic processing and execution of scRNA-seq data analysis tasks, providing high-quality results with no human intervention. Firstly, to adapt general LLMs to the biological field, CellAgent constructs LLM-driven biological expert roles - planner, executor, and evaluator - each with specific responsibilities. Then, CellAgent introduces a hierarchical decision-making mechanism to coordinate these biological experts, effectively driving the planning and step-by-step execution of complex data analysis tasks. Furthermore, we propose a self-iterative optimization mechanism, enabling CellAgent to autonomously evaluate and optimize solutions, thereby guaranteeing output quality. We evaluate CellAgent on a comprehensive benchmark dataset encompassing dozens of tissues and hundreds of distinct cell types. Evaluation results consistently show that CellAgent effectively identifies the most suitable tools and hyperparameters for single-cell analysis tasks, achieving optimal performance. This automated framework dramatically reduces the workload for science data analyses, bringing us into the "Agent for Science" era.

The convergence of generative large language models (LLMs), edge networks, and multi-agent systems represents a groundbreaking synergy that holds immense promise for future wireless generations, harnessing the power of collective intelligence and paving the way for self-governed networks where intelligent decision-making happens right at the edge. This article puts the stepping-stone for incorporating multi-agent generative artificial intelligence (AI) in wireless networks, and sets the scene for realizing on-device LLMs, where multi-agent LLMs are collaboratively planning and solving tasks to achieve a number of network goals. We further investigate the profound limitations of cloud-based LLMs, and explore multi-agent LLMs from a game theoretic perspective, where agents collaboratively solve tasks in competitive environments. Moreover, we establish the underpinnings for the architecture design of wireless multi-agent generative AI systems at the network level and the agent level, and we identify the wireless technologies that are envisioned to play a key role in enabling on-device LLM. To demonstrate the promising potentials of wireless multi-agent generative AI networks, we highlight the benefits that can be achieved when implementing wireless generative agents in intent-based networking, and we provide a case study to showcase how on-device LLMs can contribute to solving network intents in a collaborative fashion. We finally shed lights on potential challenges and sketch a research roadmap towards realizing the vision of wireless collective intelligence.

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.

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.

As AI systems pervade human life, ensuring that large language models (LLMs) make safe decisions remains a significant challenge. We introduce the Governance of the Commons Simulation (GovSim), a generative simulation platform designed to study strategic interactions and cooperative decision-making in LLMs. In GovSim, a society of AI agents must collectively balance exploiting a common resource with sustaining it for future use. This environment enables the study of how ethical considerations, strategic planning, and negotiation skills impact cooperative outcomes. We develop an LLM-based agent architecture and test it with the leading open and closed LLMs. We find that all but the most powerful LLM agents fail to achieve a sustainable equilibrium in GovSim, with the highest survival rate below 54%. Ablations reveal that successful multi-agent communication between agents is critical for achieving cooperation in these cases. Furthermore, our analyses show that the failure to achieve sustainable cooperation in most LLMs stems from their inability to formulate and analyze hypotheses about the long-term effects of their actions on the equilibrium of the group. Finally, we show that agents that leverage "Universalization"-based reasoning, a theory of moral thinking, are able to achieve significantly better sustainability. Taken together, GovSim enables us to study the mechanisms that underlie sustainable self-government with specificity and scale. We open source the full suite of our research results, including the simulation environment, agent prompts, and a comprehensive web interface.

Large language models, employed as multiple agents that interact and collaborate with each other, have excelled at solving complex tasks. The agents are programmed with prompts that declare their functionality, along with the topologies that orchestrate interactions across agents. Designing prompts and topologies for multi-agent systems (MAS) is inherently complex. To automate the entire design process, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of the design space aiming to understand the factors behind building effective MAS. We reveal that prompts together with topologies play critical roles in enabling more effective MAS design. Based on the insights, we propose Multi-Agent System Search (MASS), a MAS optimization framework that efficiently exploits the complex MAS design space by interleaving its optimization stages, from local to global, from prompts to topologies, over three stages: 1) block-level (local) prompt optimization; 2) workflow topology optimization; 3) workflow-level (global) prompt optimization, where each stage is conditioned on the iteratively optimized prompts/topologies from former stages. We show that MASS-optimized multi-agent systems outperform a spectrum of existing alternatives by a substantial margin. Based on the MASS-found systems, we finally propose design principles behind building effective multi-agent systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities as autonomous agents, yet existing benchmarks either focus on single-agent tasks or are confined to narrow domains, failing to capture the dynamics of multi-agent coordination and competition. In this paper, we introduce MultiAgentBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLM-based multi-agent systems across diverse, interactive scenarios. Our framework measures not only task completion but also the quality of collaboration and competition using novel, milestone-based key performance indicators. Moreover, we evaluate various coordination protocols (including star, chain, tree, and graph topologies) and innovative strategies such as group discussion and cognitive planning. Notably, gpt-4o-mini reaches the average highest task score, graph structure performs the best among coordination protocols in the research scenario, and cognitive planning improves milestone achievement rates by 3%. Code and datasets are public available at https://github.com/MultiagentBench/MARBLE.

The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limiting adaptability and scalability. We propose SwarmAgentic, a framework for fully automated agentic system generation that constructs agentic systems from scratch and jointly optimizes agent functionality and collaboration as interdependent components through language-driven exploration. To enable efficient search over system-level structures, SwarmAgentic maintains a population of candidate systems and evolves them via feedback-guided updates, drawing inspiration from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We evaluate our method on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks involving high-level planning, system-level coordination, and creative reasoning. Given only a task description and an objective function, SwarmAgentic outperforms all baselines, achieving a +261.8% relative improvement over ADAS on the TravelPlanner benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of full automation in structurally unconstrained tasks. This framework marks a significant step toward scalable and autonomous agentic system design, bridging swarm intelligence with fully automated system multi-agent generation. Our code is publicly released at https://yaoz720.github.io/SwarmAgentic/.

Significant progress has been made in automated problem-solving using societies of agents powered by large language models (LLMs). In finance, efforts have largely focused on single-agent systems handling specific tasks or multi-agent frameworks independently gathering data. However, the multi-agent systems' potential to replicate real-world trading firms' collaborative dynamics remains underexplored. TradingAgents proposes a novel stock trading framework inspired by trading firms, featuring LLM-powered agents in specialized roles such as fundamental analysts, sentiment analysts, technical analysts, and traders with varied risk profiles. The framework includes Bull and Bear researcher agents assessing market conditions, a risk management team monitoring exposure, and traders synthesizing insights from debates and historical data to make informed decisions. By simulating a dynamic, collaborative trading environment, this framework aims to improve trading performance. Detailed architecture and extensive experiments reveal its superiority over baseline models, with notable improvements in cumulative returns, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown, highlighting the potential of multi-agent LLM frameworks in financial trading. TradingAgents is available at https://github.com/TauricResearch/TradingAgents.

The rapid progress of foundation models has led to the prosperity of autonomous agents, which leverage the universal capabilities of foundation models to conduct reasoning, decision-making, and environmental interaction. However, the efficacy of agents remains limited when operating in intricate, realistic environments. In this work, we introduce the principles of Unified Alignment for Agents (UA^2), which advocate for the simultaneous alignment of agents with human intentions, environmental dynamics, and self-constraints such as the limitation of monetary budgets. From the perspective of UA^2, we review the current agent research and highlight the neglected factors in existing agent benchmarks and method candidates. We also conduct proof-of-concept studies by introducing realistic features to WebShop, including user profiles to demonstrate intentions, personalized reranking for complex environmental dynamics, and runtime cost statistics to reflect self-constraints. We then follow the principles of UA^2 to propose an initial design of our agent, and benchmark its performance with several candidate baselines in the retrofitted WebShop. The extensive experimental results further prove the importance of the principles of UA^2. Our research sheds light on the next steps of autonomous agent research with improved general problem-solving abilities.

Recent advancements in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated tremendous potential in diverse task scenarios. Nonetheless, existing agentic systems typically rely on predefined agent-role design spaces and static communication structures, limiting their adaptability as well as flexibility in complex interaction environments and leading to subpar performance on highly specialized and expert-level tasks. To address these issues, we introduce HALO, a multi-agent collaboration framework based on a hierarchical reasoning architecture. Specifically, we incorporate a high-level planning agent for task decomposition, mid-level role-design agents for subtask-specific agent instantiation, and low-level inference agents for subtask execution. Particularly, subtask execution is reformulated as a structured workflow search problem, where Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) systematically explores the agentic action space to construct optimal reasoning trajectories. Additionally, as the majority of users lack expertise in prompt engineering, we leverage an Adaptive Prompt Refinement module to transform raw queries into task-specific prompts. Empirical evaluations on Code Generation (HumanEval), General Reasoning (MMLU), and Arithmetic Reasoning (MATH) benchmark datasets highlight the effectiveness of HALO, yielding a 14.4% average improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, HALO achieves up to 13.3% performance gain on the Moral Scenarios subject in the MMLU benchmark and up to 19.6% performance gain on the Algebra subarea in the MATH benchmark, indicating its advanced proficiency in tackling highly specialized and expert-level tasks. The code repository is available at https://github.com/23japhone/HALO.

Multi-agent systems represent a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, enabling complex problem-solving through coordinated specialized agents. However, these systems face fundamental challenges in context management, coordination efficiency, and scalable operation. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for advancing multi-agent systems through Model Context Protocol (MCP), addressing these challenges through standardized context sharing and coordination mechanisms. We extend previous work on AI agent architectures by developing a unified theoretical foundation, advanced context management techniques, and scalable coordination patterns. Through detailed implementation case studies across enterprise knowledge management, collaborative research, and distributed problem-solving domains, we demonstrate significant performance improvements compared to traditional approaches. Our evaluation methodology provides a systematic assessment framework with benchmark tasks and datasets specifically designed for multi-agent systems. We identify current limitations, emerging research opportunities, and potential transformative applications across industries. This work contributes to the evolution of more capable, collaborative, and context-aware artificial intelligence systems that can effectively address complex real-world challenges.

Multi-agent learning algorithms have been successful at generating superhuman planning in a wide variety of games but have had little impact on the design of deployed multi-agent planners. A key bottleneck in applying these techniques to multi-agent planning is that they require billions of steps of experience. To enable the study of multi-agent planning at this scale, we present GPUDrive, a GPU-accelerated, multi-agent simulator built on top of the Madrona Game Engine that can generate over a million steps of experience per second. Observation, reward, and dynamics functions are written directly in C++, allowing users to define complex, heterogeneous agent behaviors that are lowered to high-performance CUDA. We show that using GPUDrive we are able to effectively train reinforcement learning agents over many scenes in the Waymo Motion dataset, yielding highly effective goal-reaching agents in minutes for individual scenes and generally capable agents in a few hours. We ship these trained agents as part of the code base at https://github.com/Emerge-Lab/gpudrive.

Autonomous agents have made great strides in specialist domains like Atari games and Go. However, they typically learn tabula rasa in isolated environments with limited and manually conceived objectives, thus failing to generalize across a wide spectrum of tasks and capabilities. Inspired by how humans continually learn and adapt in the open world, we advocate a trinity of ingredients for building generalist agents: 1) an environment that supports a multitude of tasks and goals, 2) a large-scale database of multimodal knowledge, and 3) a flexible and scalable agent architecture. We introduce MineDojo, a new framework built on the popular Minecraft game that features a simulation suite with thousands of diverse open-ended tasks and an internet-scale knowledge base with Minecraft videos, tutorials, wiki pages, and forum discussions. Using MineDojo's data, we propose a novel agent learning algorithm that leverages large pre-trained video-language models as a learned reward function. Our agent is able to solve a variety of open-ended tasks specified in free-form language without any manually designed dense shaping reward. We open-source the simulation suite, knowledge bases, algorithm implementation, and pretrained models (https://minedojo.org) to promote research towards the goal of generally capable embodied agents.

With the explosive influence caused by the success of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT and GPT-4, there has been an extensive amount of recent work showing that foundation models can be used to solve a large variety of tasks. However, there is very limited work that shares insights on multi-agent planning. Multi-agent planning is different from other domains by combining the difficulty of multi-agent coordination and planning, and making it hard to leverage external tools to facilitate the reasoning needed. In this paper, we focus on the problem of multi-agent path finding (MAPF), which is also known as multi-robot route planning, and study the performance of solving MAPF with LLMs. We first show the motivating success on an empty room map without obstacles, then the failure to plan on the harder room map and maze map of the standard MAPF benchmark. We present our position on why directly solving MAPF with LLMs has not been successful yet, and we use various experiments to support our hypothesis. Based on our results, we discussed how researchers with different backgrounds could help with this problem from different perspectives.

The rapid advancement of conversational and chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This paper explores the potential of building scalable techniques to facilitate autonomous cooperation among communicative agents and provide insight into their "cognitive" processes. To address the challenges of achieving autonomous cooperation, we propose a novel communicative agent framework named role-playing. Our approach involves using inception prompting to guide chat agents toward task completion while maintaining consistency with human intentions. We showcase how role-playing can be used to generate conversational data for studying the behaviors and capabilities of chat agents, providing a valuable resource for investigating conversational language models. Our contributions include introducing a novel communicative agent framework, offering a scalable approach for studying the cooperative behaviors and capabilities of multi-agent systems, and open-sourcing our library to support research on communicative agents and beyond. The GitHub repository of this project is made publicly available on: https://github.com/lightaime/camel.

In this paper, we present a novel framework for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by leveraging the power of multi-agent systems. Our framework introduces a collaborative environment where multiple intelligent agent components, each with distinctive attributes and roles, work together to handle complex tasks more efficiently and effectively. We demonstrate the practicality and versatility of our framework through case studies in artificial general intelligence (AGI), specifically focusing on the Auto-GPT and BabyAGI models. We also examine the "Gorilla" model, which integrates external APIs into the LLM. Our framework addresses limitations and challenges such as looping issues, security risks, scalability, system evaluation, and ethical considerations. By modeling various domains such as courtroom simulations and software development scenarios, we showcase the potential applications and benefits of our proposed multi-agent system. Our framework provides an avenue for advancing the capabilities and performance of LLMs through collaboration and knowledge exchange among intelligent agents.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to push the boundaries of LLM capabilities, yet they often incur significant costs and face challenges in dynamic LLM selection. Current LLM routing methods effectively reduce overhead in single-agent scenarios by customizing LLM selection for each query, but they overlook the critical decisions regarding collaboration modes and agent roles in MAS. In response to this challenge, we first introduce the problem of Multi-Agent System Routing (MASR), which integrates all components of MAS into a unified routing framework. Toward this goal, we propose MasRouter, the first high-performing, cost-effective, and inductive MASR solution. MasRouter employs collaboration mode determination, role allocation, and LLM routing through a cascaded controller network, progressively constructing a MAS that balances effectiveness and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MasRouter is (1) high-performing, achieving a 1.8%sim8.2% improvement over the state-of-the-art method on MBPP; (2) economical, reducing overhead by up to 52.07% compared to SOTA methods on HumanEval; and (3) plug-and-play, seamlessly integrating with mainstream MAS frameworks, reducing overhead by 17.21%sim28.17% via customized routing. The code is available at https://github.com/yanweiyue/masrouter.

Foundation models are becoming valuable tools in medicine. Yet despite their promise, the best way to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex medical tasks remains an open question. We introduce a novel multi-agent framework, named Medical Decision-making Agents (MDAgents) that helps address this gap by automatically assigning a collaboration structure to a team of LLMs. The assigned solo or group collaboration structure is tailored to the medical task at hand, emulating real-world medical decision-making processes adapted to tasks of varying complexities. We evaluate our framework and baseline methods using state-of-the-art LLMs across a suite of real-world medical knowledge and medical diagnosis benchmarks, including a comparison of LLMs' medical complexity classification against human physicians. MDAgents achieved the best performance in seven out of ten benchmarks on tasks requiring an understanding of medical knowledge and multi-modal reasoning, showing a significant improvement of up to 4.2% (p < 0.05) compared to previous methods' best performances. Ablation studies reveal that MDAgents effectively determines medical complexity to optimize for efficiency and accuracy across diverse medical tasks. Notably, the combination of moderator review and external medical knowledge in group collaboration resulted in an average accuracy improvement of 11.8%. Our code can be found at https://github.com/mitmedialab/MDAgents.

Hierarchical organization is fundamental to biological systems and human societies, yet artificial intelligence systems often rely on monolithic architectures that limit adaptability and scalability. Current hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) approaches typically restrict hierarchies to two levels or require centralized training, which limits their practical applicability. We introduce TAME Agent Framework (TAG), a framework for constructing fully decentralized hierarchical multi-agent systems.TAG enables hierarchies of arbitrary depth through a novel LevelEnv concept, which abstracts each hierarchy level as the environment for the agents above it. This approach standardizes information flow between levels while preserving loose coupling, allowing for seamless integration of diverse agent types. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TAG by implementing hierarchical architectures that combine different RL agents across multiple levels, achieving improved performance over classical multi-agent RL baselines on standard benchmarks. Our results show that decentralized hierarchical organization enhances both learning speed and final performance, positioning TAG as a promising direction for scalable multi-agent systems.

Solving the problem of cooperation is fundamentally important for the creation and maintenance of functional societies. Problems of cooperation are omnipresent within human society, with examples ranging from navigating busy road junctions to negotiating treaties. As the use of AI becomes more pervasive throughout society, the need for socially intelligent agents capable of navigating these complex cooperative dilemmas is becoming increasingly evident. Direct punishment is a ubiquitous social mechanism that has been shown to foster the emergence of cooperation in both humans and non-humans. In the natural world, direct punishment is often strongly coupled with partner selection and reputation and used in conjunction with third-party punishment. The interactions between these mechanisms could potentially enhance the emergence of cooperation within populations. However, no previous work has evaluated the learning dynamics and outcomes emerging from Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) populations that combine these mechanisms. This paper addresses this gap. It presents a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the behaviors and learning dynamics associated with direct punishment, third-party punishment, partner selection, and reputation. Finally, we discuss the implications of using these mechanisms on the design of cooperative AI systems.

In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), independent learning (IL) often shows remarkable performance and easily scales with the number of agents. Yet, using IL can be inefficient and runs the risk of failing to successfully train, particularly in scenarios that require agents to coordinate their actions. Using centralised learning (CL) enables MARL agents to quickly learn how to coordinate their behaviour but employing CL everywhere is often prohibitively expensive in real-world applications. Besides, using CL in value-based methods often needs strong representational constraints (e.g. individual-global-max condition) that can lead to poor performance if violated. In this paper, we introduce a novel plug & play IL framework named Multi-Agent Network Selection Algorithm (MANSA) which selectively employs CL only at states that require coordination. At its core, MANSA has an additional agent that uses switching controls to quickly learn the best states to activate CL during training, using CL only where necessary and vastly reducing the computational burden of CL. Our theory proves MANSA preserves cooperative MARL convergence properties, boosts IL performance and can optimally make use of a fixed budget on the number CL calls. We show empirically in Level-based Foraging (LBF) and StarCraft Multi-agent Challenge (SMAC) that MANSA achieves fast, superior and more reliable performance while making 40% fewer CL calls in SMAC and using CL at only 1% CL calls in LBF.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide array of tasks. Due to the impressive planning and reasoning abilities of LLMs, they have been used as autonomous agents to do many tasks automatically. Recently, based on the development of using one LLM as a single planning or decision-making agent, LLM-based multi-agent systems have achieved considerable progress in complex problem-solving and world simulation. To provide the community with an overview of this dynamic field, we present this survey to offer an in-depth discussion on the essential aspects of multi-agent systems based on LLMs, as well as the challenges. Our goal is for readers to gain substantial insights on the following questions: What domains and environments do LLM-based multi-agents simulate? How are these agents profiled and how do they communicate? What mechanisms contribute to the growth of agents' capacities? For those interested in delving into this field of study, we also summarize the commonly used datasets or benchmarks for them to have convenient access. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source GitHub repository, dedicated to outlining the research on LLM-based multi-agent systems.

In this paper, we introduce a simulacrum of hospital called Agent Hospital that simulates the entire process of treating illness. All patients, nurses, and doctors are autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs). Our central goal is to enable a doctor agent to learn how to treat illness within the simulacrum. To do so, we propose a method called MedAgent-Zero. As the simulacrum can simulate disease onset and progression based on knowledge bases and LLMs, doctor agents can keep accumulating experience from both successful and unsuccessful cases. Simulation experiments show that the treatment performance of doctor agents consistently improves on various tasks. More interestingly, the knowledge the doctor agents have acquired in Agent Hospital is applicable to real-world medicare benchmarks. After treating around ten thousand patients (real-world doctors may take over two years), the evolved doctor agent achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 93.06% on a subset of the MedQA dataset that covers major respiratory diseases. This work paves the way for advancing the applications of LLM-powered agent techniques in medical scenarios.

Embodied multi-agent systems (EMAS) have attracted growing attention for their potential to address complex, real-world challenges in areas such as logistics and robotics. Recent advances in foundation models pave the way for generative agents capable of richer communication and adaptive problem-solving. This survey provides a systematic examination of how EMAS can benefit from these generative capabilities. We propose a taxonomy that categorizes EMAS by system architectures and embodiment modalities, emphasizing how collaboration spans both physical and virtual contexts. Central building blocks, perception, planning, communication, and feedback, are then analyzed to illustrate how generative techniques bolster system robustness and flexibility. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the transformative effects of integrating foundation models into embodied, multi-agent frameworks. Finally, we discuss challenges and future directions, underlining the significant promise of EMAS to reshape the landscape of AI-driven collaboration.

Despite much progress in training distributed artificial intelligence (AI), building cooperative multi-agent systems with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces challenges in sample efficiency, interpretability, and transferability. Unlike traditional learning-based methods that require extensive interaction with the environment, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in zero-shot planning and complex reasoning. However, existing LLM-based approaches heavily rely on text-based observations and struggle with the non-Markovian nature of multi-agent interactions under partial observability. We present COMPASS, a novel multi-agent architecture that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) with a dynamic skill library and structured communication for decentralized closed-loop decision-making. The skill library, bootstrapped from demonstrations, evolves via planner-guided tasks to enable adaptive strategies. COMPASS propagates entity information through multi-hop communication under partial observability. Evaluations on the improved StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMACv2) demonstrate COMPASS's strong performance against state-of-the-art MARL baselines across both symmetric and asymmetric scenarios. Notably, in the symmetric Protoss 5v5 task, COMPASS achieved a 57\% win rate, representing a 30 percentage point advantage over QMIX (27\%). Project page can be found at https://stellar-entremet-1720bb.netlify.app/.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing complex, agentic tasks, from generating high-quality presentation slides to even conducting sophisticated scientific research. Meanwhile, RL has been widely recognized for its effectiveness in enhancing agent intelligence, but limited research has investigated the fine-tuning of LaMAS using foundational RL techniques. Moreover, the direct application of MARL methods to LaMAS introduces significant challenges, stemming from the unique characteristics and mechanisms inherent to LaMAS. To address these challenges, this article presents a comprehensive study of LLM-based MARL and proposes a novel paradigm termed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (MARFT). We introduce a brand-new POMDP called Flex-POMDP, which aligns with the LaMAS optimization in real-world applications and a universal algorithmic framework tailored specifically for LaMAS, outlining the conceptual foundations, key distinctions, and practical implementation strategies. We review the evolution from RL to RFT, setting the stage for a parallel analysis in the multi-agent domain. In the context of LaMAS, we elucidate critical differences between MARL and MARFT. These differences motivate a transition toward a LaMAS-oriented formulation of RFT. Central to this work is a robust and scalable MARFT framework. We detail the core algorithm and provide a complete, open-source implementation to facilitate adoption and further research. The latter sections of the paper explore real-world application perspectives and opening challenges in MARFT. By bridging theoretical underpinnings with practical methodologies, this work serves as a roadmap for researchers seeking to advance MARFT toward resilient and adaptive solutions in agentic systems. Our implementation of the proposed framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/jwliao-ai/MARFT.

We consider multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for cooperative communication and coordination tasks. MARL agents can be brittle because they can overfit their training partners' policies. This overfitting can produce agents that adopt policies that act under the expectation that other agents will act in a certain way rather than react to their actions. Our objective is to bias the learning process towards finding reactive strategies towards other agents' behaviors. Our method, transfer empowerment, measures the potential influence between agents' actions. Results from three simulated cooperation scenarios support our hypothesis that transfer empowerment improves MARL performance. We discuss how transfer empowerment could be a useful principle to guide multi-agent coordination by ensuring reactiveness to one's partner.

In this paper, we propose a framework for solving a single-agent task by using multiple agents, each focusing on different aspects of the task. This approach has two main advantages: 1) it allows for training specialized agents on different parts of the task, and 2) it provides a new way to transfer knowledge, by transferring trained agents. Our framework generalizes the traditional hierarchical decomposition, in which, at any moment in time, a single agent has control until it has solved its particular subtask. We illustrate our framework with empirical experiments on two domains.

Through multi-agent competition, the simple objective of hide-and-seek, and standard reinforcement learning algorithms at scale, we find that agents create a self-supervised autocurriculum inducing multiple distinct rounds of emergent strategy, many of which require sophisticated tool use and coordination. We find clear evidence of six emergent phases in agent strategy in our environment, each of which creates a new pressure for the opposing team to adapt; for instance, agents learn to build multi-object shelters using moveable boxes which in turn leads to agents discovering that they can overcome obstacles using ramps. We further provide evidence that multi-agent competition may scale better with increasing environment complexity and leads to behavior that centers around far more human-relevant skills than other self-supervised reinforcement learning methods such as intrinsic motivation. Finally, we propose transfer and fine-tuning as a way to quantitatively evaluate targeted capabilities, and we compare hide-and-seek agents to both intrinsic motivation and random initialization baselines in a suite of domain-specific intelligence tests.

Intelligent agents stand out as a potential path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Thus, researchers have dedicated significant effort to diverse implementations for them. Benefiting from recent progress in large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents that use universal natural language as an interface exhibit robust generalization capabilities across various applications -- from serving as autonomous general-purpose task assistants to applications in coding, social, and economic domains, LLM-based agents offer extensive exploration opportunities. This paper surveys current research to provide an in-depth overview of LLM-based intelligent agents within single-agent and multi-agent systems. It covers their definitions, research frameworks, and foundational components such as their composition, cognitive and planning methods, tool utilization, and responses to environmental feedback. We also delve into the mechanisms of deploying LLM-based agents in multi-agent systems, including multi-role collaboration, message passing, and strategies to alleviate communication issues between agents. The discussions also shed light on popular datasets and application scenarios. We conclude by envisioning prospects for LLM-based agents, considering the evolving landscape of AI and natural language processing.

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant research attention. However, fully harnessing the potential of LLMs for agent-based tasks presents inherent challenges due to the heterogeneous nature of diverse data sources featuring multi-turn trajectories. In this paper, we introduce AgentOhana as a comprehensive solution to address these challenges. AgentOhana aggregates agent trajectories from distinct environments, spanning a wide array of scenarios. It meticulously standardizes and unifies these trajectories into a consistent format, streamlining the creation of a generic data loader optimized for agent training. Leveraging the data unification, our training pipeline maintains equilibrium across different data sources and preserves independent randomness across devices during dataset partitioning and model training. Additionally, we present xLAM-v0.1, a large action model tailored for AI agents, which demonstrates exceptional performance across various benchmarks.

Reliable multi-agent trajectory prediction is crucial for the safe planning and control of autonomous systems. Compared with single-agent cases, the major challenge in simultaneously processing multiple agents lies in modeling complex social interactions caused by various driving intentions and road conditions. Previous methods typically leverage graph-based message propagation or attention mechanism to encapsulate such interactions in the format of marginal probabilistic distributions. However, it is inherently sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose IPCC-TP, a novel relevance-aware module based on Incremental Pearson Correlation Coefficient to improve multi-agent interaction modeling. IPCC-TP learns pairwise joint Gaussian Distributions through the tightly-coupled estimation of the means and covariances according to interactive incremental movements. Our module can be conveniently embedded into existing multi-agent prediction methods to extend original motion distribution decoders. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets demonstrate that IPCC-TP improves the performance of baselines by a large margin.

LLM-based agents have made significant advancements in interactive environments, such as mobile operations and web browsing, and other domains beyond computer using. Current multi-agent systems universally excel in performance, compared to single agents, but struggle with generalization across environments due to predefined roles and inadequate strategies for generalizing language agents. The challenge of achieving both strong performance and good generalization has hindered the progress of multi-agent systems for interactive environments. To address these issues, we propose CollabUIAgents, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with a novel multi-agent credit re-assignment (CR) strategy, assigning process rewards with LLMs rather than environment-specific rewards and learning with synthesized preference data, in order to foster generalizable, collaborative behaviors among the role-free agents' policies. Empirical results show that our framework improves both performance and cross-environment generalizability of multi-agent systems. Moreover, our 7B-parameter system achieves results on par with or exceed strong closed-source models, and the LLM that guides the CR. We also provide insights in using granular CR rewards effectively for environment generalization, and accommodating trained LLMs in multi-agent systems.

Traditional sociological research often relies on human participation, which, though effective, is expensive, challenging to scale, and with ethical concerns. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential to simulate human behavior, enabling the replication of individual responses and facilitating studies on many interdisciplinary studies. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the recent progress in simulation driven by LLM-empowered agents. We categorize the simulations into three types: (1) Individual Simulation, which mimics specific individuals or demographic groups; (2) Scenario Simulation, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve goals within specific contexts; and (3) Society Simulation, which models interactions within agent societies to reflect the complexity and variety of real-world dynamics. These simulations follow a progression, ranging from detailed individual modeling to large-scale societal phenomena. We provide a detailed discussion of each simulation type, including the architecture or key components of the simulation, the classification of objectives or scenarios and the evaluation method. Afterward, we summarize commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the trends across these three types of simulation. A repository for the related sources is at {https://github.com/FudanDISC/SocialAgent}.

In social sciences, researchers often face challenges when conducting large-scale experiments, particularly due to the simulations' complexity and the lack of technical expertise required to develop such frameworks. Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) is a computational approach that simulates agents' actions and interactions to evaluate how their behaviors influence the outcomes. However, the traditional implementation of ABM can be demanding and complex. Generative Agent-Based Modeling (GABM) offers a solution by enabling scholars to create simulations where AI-driven agents can generate complex behaviors based on underlying rules and interactions. This paper introduces a framework for designing reliable experiments using GABM, making sophisticated simulation techniques more accessible to researchers across various fields. We provide a step-by-step guide for selecting appropriate tools, designing the model, establishing experimentation protocols, and validating results.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) leveraging the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant potential for tackling complex tasks. However, most current MAS depend on manually designed agent roles and communication protocols. These manual designs often fail to align with the underlying LLMs' strengths and struggle to adapt to novel tasks. Recent automatic MAS approaches attempt to mitigate these limitations but typically necessitate a validation set for tuning and yield static MAS designs lacking adaptability during inference. We introduce MAS-ZERO, the first self-evolved, inference-time framework for automatic MAS design. MAS-ZERO employs meta-level design to iteratively generate, evaluate, and refine MAS configurations tailored to each problem instance, without requiring a validation set. Critically, it enables dynamic agent composition and problem decomposition through meta-feedback on solvability and completeness. Experiments across math, graduate-level QA, and software engineering benchmarks, using both closed-source and open-source LLM backbones of varying sizes, demonstrate that MAS-ZERO outperforms both manual and automatic MAS baselines, achieving a 7.44% average accuracy improvement over the next strongest baseline while maintaining cost-efficiency. These findings underscore the promise of meta-level self-evolved design for creating effective and adaptive MAS.

The emergence of complex life on Earth is often attributed to the arms race that ensued from a huge number of organisms all competing for finite resources. We present an artificial intelligence research environment, inspired by the human game genre of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, a.k.a. MMOs), that aims to simulate this setting in microcosm. As with MMORPGs and the real world alike, our environment is persistent and supports a large and variable number of agents. Our environment is well suited to the study of large-scale multiagent interaction: it requires that agents learn robust combat and navigation policies in the presence of large populations attempting to do the same. Baseline experiments reveal that population size magnifies and incentivizes the development of skillful behaviors and results in agents that outcompete agents trained in smaller populations. We further show that the policies of agents with unshared weights naturally diverge to fill different niches in order to avoid competition.

Recent advances in agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in solving complex tasks. However, most current methods lack mechanisms for coordinating specialized agents and have limited ability to generalize to new or diverse domains. We introduce \projectname, a hierarchical multi-agent framework for general-purpose task solving that integrates high-level planning with modular agent collaboration. Inspired by the way a conductor orchestrates a symphony and guided by the principles of extensibility, multimodality, modularity, and coordination, \projectname 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 and analytical 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. \projectname supports flexible orchestration through explicit sub-goal formulation, inter-agent communication, and adaptive role allocation. We evaluate the framework on three widely used benchmark datasets covering various real-world tasks, searching web pages, reasoning over heterogeneous modalities, etc. Experimental results demonstrate that \projectname consistently outperforms flat-agent and monolithic baselines in task success rate and adaptability. These findings highlight the effectiveness of hierarchical organization and role specialization in building scalable and general-purpose LLM-based agent systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in chemistry, significantly impacting molecule design, property prediction, and synthesis optimization. This review highlights LLM capabilities in these domains and their potential to accelerate scientific discovery through automation. We also review LLM-based autonomous agents: LLMs with a broader set of tools to interact with their surrounding environment. These agents perform diverse tasks such as paper scraping, interfacing with automated laboratories, and synthesis planning. As agents are an emerging topic, we extend the scope of our review of agents beyond chemistry and discuss across any scientific domains. This review covers the recent history, current capabilities, and design of LLMs and autonomous agents, addressing specific challenges, opportunities, and future directions in chemistry. Key challenges include data quality and integration, model interpretability, and the need for standard benchmarks, while future directions point towards more sophisticated multi-modal agents and enhanced collaboration between agents and experimental methods. Due to the quick pace of this field, a repository has been built to keep track of the latest studies: https://github.com/ur-whitelab/LLMs-in-science.

This survey paper examines the recent advancements in AI agent implementations, with a focus on their ability to achieve complex goals that require enhanced reasoning, planning, and tool execution capabilities. The primary objectives of this work are to a) communicate the current capabilities and limitations of existing AI agent implementations, b) share insights gained from our observations of these systems in action, and c) suggest important considerations for future developments in AI agent design. We achieve this by providing overviews of single-agent and multi-agent architectures, identifying key patterns and divergences in design choices, and evaluating their overall impact on accomplishing a provided goal. Our contribution outlines key themes when selecting an agentic architecture, the impact of leadership on agent systems, agent communication styles, and key phases for planning, execution, and reflection that enable robust AI agent systems.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) built on large language models (LLMs) offer a promising path toward solving complex, real-world tasks that single-agent systems often struggle to manage. While recent advancements in test-time scaling (TTS) have significantly improved single-agent performance on challenging reasoning tasks, how to effectively scale collaboration and reasoning in MAS remains an open question. In this work, we introduce an adaptive multi-agent framework designed to enhance collaborative reasoning through both model-level training and system-level coordination. We construct M500, a high-quality dataset containing 500 multi-agent collaborative reasoning traces, and fine-tune Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct on this dataset to produce M1-32B, a model optimized for multi-agent collaboration. To further enable adaptive reasoning, we propose a novel CEO agent that dynamically manages the discussion process, guiding agent collaboration and adjusting reasoning depth for more effective problem-solving. Evaluated in an open-source MAS across a range of tasks-including general understanding, mathematical reasoning, and coding-our system significantly outperforms strong baselines. For instance, M1-32B achieves 12% improvement on GPQA-Diamond, 41% on AIME2024, and 10% on MBPP-Sanitized, matching the performance of state-of-the-art models like DeepSeek-R1 on some tasks. These results highlight the importance of both learned collaboration and adaptive coordination in scaling multi-agent reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/jincan333/MAS-TTS

Recent advances in LLMs have enabled their use as autonomous agents across a range of tasks, yet they continue to struggle with formulating and adhering to coherent long-term strategies. In this paper, we investigate whether LLM agents can self-improve when placed in environments that explicitly challenge their strategic planning abilities. Using the board game Settlers of Catan, accessed through the open-source Catanatron framework, we benchmark a progression of LLM-based agents, from a simple game-playing agent to systems capable of autonomously rewriting their own prompts and their player agent's code. We introduce a multi-agent architecture in which specialized roles (Analyzer, Researcher, Coder, and Player) collaborate to iteratively analyze gameplay, research new strategies, and modify the agent's logic or prompt. By comparing manually crafted agents to those evolved entirely by LLMs, we evaluate how effectively these systems can diagnose failure and adapt over time. Our results show that self-evolving agents, particularly when powered by models like Claude 3.7 and GPT-4o, outperform static baselines by autonomously adopting their strategies, passing along sample behavior to game-playing agents, and demonstrating adaptive reasoning over multiple iterations.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of AI agents that exhibit increasingly human-like behaviors, including planning, adaptation, and social dynamics across diverse, interactive, and open-ended scenarios. These behaviors are not solely the product of the internal architectures of the underlying models, but emerge from their integration into agentic systems operating within specific contexts, where environmental factors, social cues, and interaction feedbacks shape behavior over time. This evolution necessitates a new scientific perspective: AI Agent Behavioral Science. Rather than focusing only on internal mechanisms, this perspective emphasizes the systematic observation of behavior, design of interventions to test hypotheses, and theory-guided interpretation of how AI agents act, adapt, and interact over time. We systematize a growing body of research across individual agent, multi-agent, and human-agent interaction settings, and further demonstrate how this perspective informs responsible AI by treating fairness, safety, interpretability, accountability, and privacy as behavioral properties. By unifying recent findings and laying out future directions, we position AI Agent Behavioral Science as a necessary complement to traditional model-centric approaches, providing essential tools for understanding, evaluating, and governing the real-world behavior of increasingly autonomous AI systems.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach where agents can form swarms to produce high-quality responses effectively. This is accomplished by utilizing agents capable of data inference and ranking, which can be effectively implemented using LLMs as response classifiers. We assess existing approaches for trustless agent inference, define our methodology, estimate practical parameters, and model various types of malicious agent attacks. Our method leverages the collective intelligence of swarms, ensuring robust and efficient decentralized AI inference with better accuracy, security, and reliability. We show that our approach is an order of magnitude faster than other trustless inference strategies reaching less than 125 ms validation latency.

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...

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has inspired the development of LLM-based agents capable of addressing complex, real-world tasks. However, these agents often struggle during task execution due to methodological constraints, such as error propagation and limited adaptability. To address this issue, we propose a multi-agent framework based on dynamic Task Decomposition and Agent Generation (TDAG). This framework dynamically decomposes complex tasks into smaller subtasks and assigns each to a specifically generated subagent, thereby enhancing adaptability in diverse and unpredictable real-world tasks. Simultaneously, existing benchmarks often lack the granularity needed to evaluate incremental progress in complex, multi-step tasks. In response, we introduce ItineraryBench in the context of travel planning, featuring interconnected, progressively complex tasks with a fine-grained evaluation system. ItineraryBench is designed to assess agents' abilities in memory, planning, and tool usage across tasks of varying complexity. Our experimental results reveal that TDAG significantly outperforms established baselines, showcasing its superior adaptability and context awareness in complex task scenarios.

Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to the creation of intelligent agents capable of performing complex tasks. This paper introduces a novel LLM-based multimodal agent framework designed to operate smartphone applications. Our framework enables the agent to operate smartphone applications through a simplified action space, mimicking human-like interactions such as tapping and swiping. This novel approach bypasses the need for system back-end access, thereby broadening its applicability across diverse apps. Central to our agent's functionality is its innovative learning method. The agent learns to navigate and use new apps either through autonomous exploration or by observing human demonstrations. This process generates a knowledge base that the agent refers to for executing complex tasks across different applications. To demonstrate the practicality of our agent, we conducted extensive testing over 50 tasks in 10 different applications, including social media, email, maps, shopping, and sophisticated image editing tools. The results affirm our agent's proficiency in handling a diverse array of high-level tasks.

Scaling laws for inference compute in multi-agent systems remain under-explored compared to single-agent scenarios. This work aims to bridge this gap by investigating the problem of data synthesis through multi-agent sampling, where synthetic responses are generated by sampling from multiple distinct language models. Effective model coordination is crucial for successful multi-agent collaboration. Unlike previous approaches that rely on fixed workflows, we treat model coordination as a multi-step decision-making process, optimizing generation structures dynamically for each input question. We introduce Tree Search-based Orchestrated Agents~(TOA), where the workflow evolves iteratively during the sequential sampling process. To achieve this, we leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), integrating a reward model to provide real-time feedback and accelerate exploration. Our experiments on alignment, machine translation, and mathematical reasoning demonstrate that multi-agent sampling significantly outperforms single-agent sampling as inference compute scales. TOA is the most compute-efficient approach, achieving SOTA performance on WMT and a 71.8\% LC win rate on AlpacaEval. Moreover, fine-tuning with our synthesized alignment data surpasses strong preference learning methods on challenging benchmarks such as Arena-Hard and AlpacaEval.

Games have been vital test beds for the rapid development of Agent-based research. Remarkable progress has been achieved in the past, but it is unclear if the findings equip for real-world problems. While pressure grows, some of the most critical ecological challenges can find mitigation and prevention solutions through technology and its applications. Most real-world domains include multi-agent scenarios and require machine-machine and human-machine collaboration. Open-source environments have not advanced and are often toy scenarios, too abstract or not suitable for multi-agent research. By mimicking real-world problems and increasing the complexity of environments, we hope to advance state-of-the-art multi-agent research and inspire researchers to work on immediate real-world problems. Here, we present HIVEX, an environment suite to benchmark multi-agent research focusing on ecological challenges. HIVEX includes the following environments: Wind Farm Control, Wildfire Resource Management, Drone-Based Reforestation, Ocean Plastic Collection, and Aerial Wildfire Suppression. We provide environments, training examples, and baselines for the main and sub-tasks. All trained models resulting from the experiments of this work are hosted on Hugging Face. We also provide a leaderboard on Hugging Face and encourage the community to submit models trained on our environment suite.

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.

While significant advances have been made for single-agent perception, many applications require multiple sensing agents and cross-agent communication due to benefits such as coverage and robustness. It is therefore critical to develop frameworks which support multi-agent collaborative perception in a distributed and bandwidth-efficient manner. In this paper, we address the collaborative perception problem, where one agent is required to perform a perception task and can communicate and share information with other agents on the same task. Specifically, we propose a communication framework by learning both to construct communication groups and decide when to communicate. We demonstrate the generalizability of our framework on two different perception tasks and show that it significantly reduces communication bandwidth while maintaining superior performance.

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), which focuses on finding collision-free paths for multiple robots, is crucial for applications ranging from aerial swarms to warehouse automation. Solving MAPF is NP-hard so learning-based approaches for MAPF have gained attention, particularly those leveraging deep neural networks. Nonetheless, despite the community's continued efforts, all learning-based MAPF planners still rely on decentralized planning due to variability in the number of agents and map sizes. We have developed the first centralized learning-based policy for MAPF problem called RAILGUN. RAILGUN is not an agent-based policy but a map-based policy. By leveraging a CNN-based architecture, RAILGUN can generalize across different maps and handle any number of agents. We collect trajectories from rule-based methods to train our model in a supervised way. In experiments, RAILGUN outperforms most baseline methods and demonstrates great zero-shot generalization capabilities on various tasks, maps and agent numbers that were not seen in the training dataset.

Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents--computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture--observation, planning, and reflection--each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing but exhibit limitations, particularly in autonomously addressing novel challenges such as reasoning and problem-solving. Traditional techniques like chain-of-thought prompting necessitate explicit human guidance. This paper introduces a novel multi-agent communication framework, inspired by the CAMEL model, to enhance LLMs' autonomous problem-solving capabilities. The framework employs multiple LLM agents, each with a distinct persona, engaged in role-playing communication, offering a nuanced and adaptable approach to diverse problem scenarios. Extensive experimentation demonstrates the framework's superior performance and adaptability, providing valuable insights into the collaborative potential of multiple agents in overcoming the limitations of individual models.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) demonstrate remarkable potential for scientific discovery. Existing approaches, however, often automate scientific discovery using predefined workflows that lack rationality constraints. This often leads to aimless hypothesizing and a failure to consistently link hypotheses with evidence, thereby hindering systematic uncertainty reduction. Overcoming these limitations fundamentally requires systematic uncertainty reduction. We introduce PiFlow, an information-theoretical framework, treating automated scientific discovery as a structured uncertainty reduction problem guided by principles (e.g., scientific laws). In evaluations across three distinct scientific domains -- discovering nanomaterial structures, bio-molecules, and superconductor candidates with targeted properties -- our method significantly improves discovery efficiency, reflected by a 73.55\% increase in the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of property values versus exploration steps, and enhances solution quality by 94.06\% compared to a vanilla agent system. Overall, PiFlow serves as a Plug-and-Play method, establishing a novel paradigm shift in highly efficient automated scientific discovery, paving the way for more robust and accelerated AI-driven research. Code is publicly available at our https://github.com/amair-lab/PiFlow{GitHub}.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing single LLMs to address complex and diverse tasks in practical applications. Despite considerable advancements, the field lacks a unified codebase that consolidates existing methods, resulting in redundant re-implementation efforts, unfair comparisons, and high entry barriers for researchers. To address these challenges, we introduce MASLab, a unified, comprehensive, and research-friendly codebase for LLM-based MAS. (1) MASLab integrates over 20 established methods across multiple domains, each rigorously validated by comparing step-by-step outputs with its official implementation. (2) MASLab provides a unified environment with various benchmarks for fair comparisons among methods, ensuring consistent inputs and standardized evaluation protocols. (3) MASLab implements methods within a shared streamlined structure, lowering the barriers for understanding and extension. Building on MASLab, we conduct extensive experiments covering 10+ benchmarks and 8 models, offering researchers a clear and comprehensive view of the current landscape of MAS methods. MASLab will continue to evolve, tracking the latest developments in the field, and invite contributions from the broader open-source community.

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.

Fully automated self-driving laboratories are promising to enable high-throughput and large-scale scientific discovery by reducing repetitive labour. However, effective automation requires deep integration of laboratory knowledge, which is often unstructured, multimodal, and difficult to incorporate into current AI systems. This paper introduces the k-agents framework, designed to support experimentalists in organizing laboratory knowledge and automating experiments with agents. Our framework employs large language model-based agents to encapsulate laboratory knowledge including available laboratory operations and methods for analyzing experiment results. To automate experiments, we introduce execution agents that break multi-step experimental procedures into state machines, interact with other agents to execute each step and analyze the experiment results. The analyzed results are then utilized to drive state transitions, enabling closed-loop feedback control. To demonstrate its capabilities, we applied the agents to calibrate and operate a superconducting quantum processor, where they autonomously planned and executed experiments for hours, successfully producing and characterizing entangled quantum states at the level achieved by human scientists. Our knowledge-based agent system opens up new possibilities for managing laboratory knowledge and accelerating scientific discovery.

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.

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.

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.

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) based Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) has recently gained attention due to its efficiency and scalability. Several MARL-MAPF methods choose to use communication to enrich the information one agent can perceive. However, existing works still struggle in structured environments with high obstacle density and a high number of agents. To further improve the performance of the communication-based MARL-MAPF solvers, we propose a new method, Ensembling Prioritized Hybrid Policies (EPH). We first propose a selective communication block to gather richer information for better agent coordination within multi-agent environments and train the model with a Q learning-based algorithm. We further introduce three advanced inference strategies aimed at bolstering performance during the execution phase. First, we hybridize the neural policy with single-agent expert guidance for navigating conflict-free zones. Secondly, we propose Q value-based methods for prioritized resolution of conflicts as well as deadlock situations. Finally, we introduce a robust ensemble method that can efficiently collect the best out of multiple possible solutions. We empirically evaluate EPH in complex multi-agent environments and demonstrate competitive performance against state-of-the-art neural methods for MAPF. We open-source our code at https://github.com/ai4co/eph-mapf.

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) has spurred a new trend in building LLM-based autonomous agents for solving complex tasks, especially multi-agent systems. Despite the remarkable progress, we notice that existing works are heavily dependent on human-designed frameworks, which greatly limits the functional scope and scalability of agent systems. How to automatically extend the specialized agent to multi-agent systems to improve task-solving capability still remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce EvoAgent, a generic method to automatically extend expert agents to multi-agent systems via the evolutionary algorithm, thereby improving the effectiveness of LLM-based agents in solving tasks. Specifically, we consider the existing agent frameworks as the initial individual and then apply a series of evolutionary operators (e.g., mutation, crossover, selection, etc.) to generate multiple agents with diverse agent settings. EvoAgent can be generalized to any LLM-based agent framework, and can automatically extend the existing agent framework to multi-agent systems without any extra human designs. Experimental results across various tasks have shown that EvoAgent can automatically generate multiple expert agents and significantly enhance the task-solving capabilities of LLM-based agents.

In recent years, Large-Language-Model-driven AI agents have exhibited unprecedented intelligence, flexibility, and adaptability, and are rapidly changing human production and lifestyle. Nowadays, agents are undergoing a new round of evolution. They no longer act as an isolated island like LLMs. Instead, they start to communicate with diverse external entities, such as other agents and tools, to collectively perform more complex tasks. Under this trend, agent communication is regarded as a foundational pillar of the future AI ecosystem, and many organizations intensively begin to design related communication protocols (e.g., Anthropic's MCP and Google's A2A) within the recent few months. However, this new field exposes significant security hazard, which can cause severe damage to real-world scenarios. To help researchers to quickly figure out this promising topic and benefit the future agent communication development, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of agent communication security. More precisely, we first present a clear definition of agent communication and categorize the entire lifecyle of agent communication into three stages: user-agent interaction, agent-agent communication, and agent-environment communication. Next, for each communication phase, we dissect related protocols and analyze its security risks according to the communication characteristics. Then, we summarize and outlook on the possible defense countermeasures for each risk. Finally, we discuss open issues and future directions in this promising research field.

As the field of AI continues to evolve, a significant dimension of this progression is the development of Large Language Models and their potential to enhance multi-agent artificial intelligence systems. This paper explores the cooperative capabilities of Large Language Model-augmented Autonomous Agents (LAAs) using the well-known Meltin Pot environments along with reference models such as GPT4 and GPT3.5. Preliminary results suggest that while these agents demonstrate a propensity for cooperation, they still struggle with effective collaboration in given environments, emphasizing the need for more robust architectures. The study's contributions include an abstraction layer to adapt Melting Pot game scenarios for LLMs, the implementation of a reusable architecture for LLM-mediated agent development - which includes short and long-term memories and different cognitive modules, and the evaluation of cooperation capabilities using a set of metrics tied to the Melting Pot's "Commons Harvest" game. The paper closes, by discussing the limitations of the current architectural framework and the potential of a new set of modules that fosters better cooperation among LAAs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in scientific domains, yet a fundamental question remains unanswered: Can we simulate human research communities with LLMs? Addressing this question can deepen our understanding of the processes behind idea brainstorming and inspire the automatic discovery of novel scientific insights. In this work, we propose ResearchTown, a multi-agent framework for research community simulation. Within this framework, the human research community is simplified and modeled as an agent-data graph, where researchers and papers are represented as agent-type and data-type nodes, respectively, and connected based on their collaboration relationships. We also introduce TextGNN, a text-based inference framework that models various research activities (e.g., paper reading, paper writing, and review writing) as special forms of a unified message-passing process on the agent-data graph. To evaluate the quality of the research simulation, we present ResearchBench, a benchmark that uses a node-masking prediction task for scalable and objective assessment based on similarity. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) ResearchTown can provide a realistic simulation of collaborative research activities, including paper writing and review writing; (2) ResearchTown can maintain robust simulation with multiple researchers and diverse papers; (3) ResearchTown can generate interdisciplinary research ideas that potentially inspire novel research directions.

The remarkable progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) opens up new avenues for addressing planning and decision-making problems in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, as the number of agents increases, the issues of hallucination in LLMs and coordination in MAS have become increasingly prominent. Additionally, the efficient utilization of tokens emerges as a critical consideration when employing LLMs to facilitate the interactions among a substantial number of agents. In this paper, we develop a modular framework called LLaMAC to mitigate these challenges. LLaMAC implements a value distribution encoding similar to that found in the human brain, utilizing internal and external feedback mechanisms to facilitate collaboration and iterative reasoning among its modules. Through evaluations involving system resource allocation and robot grid transportation, we demonstrate the considerable advantages afforded by our proposed approach.

Social network simulation is developed to provide a comprehensive understanding of social networks in the real world, which can be leveraged for a wide range of applications such as group behavior emergence, policy optimization, and business strategy development. However, billions of individuals and their evolving interactions involved in social networks pose challenges in accurately reflecting real-world complexities. In this study, we propose a comprehensive Social Network Simulation System (GA-S3) that leverages newly designed Group Agents to make intelligent decisions regarding various online events. Unlike other intelligent agents that represent an individual entity, our group agents model a collection of individuals exhibiting similar behaviors, facilitating the simulation of large-scale network phenomena with complex interactions at a manageable computational cost. Additionally, we have constructed a social network benchmark from 2024 popular online events that contains fine-grained information on Internet traffic variations. The experiment demonstrates that our approach is capable of achieving accurate and highly realistic prediction results. Code is open at https://github.com/AI4SS/GAS-3.

Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a challenging computational problem that typically requires to find collision-free paths for multiple agents in a shared environment. Solving MAPF optimally is NP-hard, yet efficient solutions are critical for numerous applications, including automated warehouses and transportation systems. Recently, learning-based approaches to MAPF have gained attention, particularly those leveraging deep reinforcement learning. Following current trends in machine learning, we have created a foundation model for the MAPF problems called MAPF-GPT. Using imitation learning, we have trained a policy on a set of pre-collected sub-optimal expert trajectories that can generate actions in conditions of partial observability without additional heuristics, reward functions, or communication with other agents. The resulting MAPF-GPT model demonstrates zero-shot learning abilities when solving the MAPF problem instances that were not present in the training dataset. We show that MAPF-GPT notably outperforms the current best-performing learnable-MAPF solvers on a diverse range of problem instances and is efficient in terms of computation (in the inference mode).

With the rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents and Multi-agent Systems (MAS) have significantly expanded the capabilities of LLM ecosystems. This evolution stems from empowering LLMs with additional modules such as memory, tools, environment, and even other agents. However, this advancement has also introduced more complex issues of trustworthiness, which previous research focused solely on LLMs could not cover. In this survey, we propose the TrustAgent framework, a comprehensive study on the trustworthiness of agents, characterized by modular taxonomy, multi-dimensional connotations, and technical implementation. By thoroughly investigating and summarizing newly emerged attacks, defenses, and evaluation methods for agents and MAS, we extend the concept of Trustworthy LLM to the emerging paradigm of Trustworthy Agent. In TrustAgent, we begin by deconstructing and introducing various components of the Agent and MAS. Then, we categorize their trustworthiness into intrinsic (brain, memory, and tool) and extrinsic (user, agent, and environment) aspects. Subsequently, we delineate the multifaceted meanings of trustworthiness and elaborate on the implementation techniques of existing research related to these internal and external modules. Finally, we present our insights and outlook on this domain, aiming to provide guidance for future endeavors.

Recently, Agentic AI has become an increasingly popular research field. However, we argue that current agent research practices lack standardization and scientific rigor, making it hard to conduct fair comparisons among methods. As a result, it is still unclear how different design choices in agent frameworks affect effectiveness, and measuring their progress remains challenging. In this work, we conduct a systematic empirical study on GAIA benchmark and BrowseComp to examine the impact of popular design choices in key agent components in a fair and rigorous manner. We find that the lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works, even open-sourced ones, non-reproducible, with significant variance between random runs. Therefore, we introduce a more robust evaluation protocol to stabilize comparisons. Our study reveals which components and designs are crucial for effective agents, while others are redundant, despite seeming logical. Based on our findings, we build and open-source OAgents, a new foundation agent framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. OAgents offers a modular design for various agent components, promoting future research in Agentic AI.

AI agents have become increasingly adept at complex tasks such as coding, reasoning, and multimodal understanding. However, building generalist systems requires moving beyond individual agents to collective inference -- a paradigm where multi-agent systems with diverse, task-specialized agents complement one another through structured communication and collaboration. Today, coordination is usually handled with imprecise, ad-hoc natural language, which limits complex interaction and hinders interoperability with domain-specific agents. We introduce Agent context protocols (ACPs): a domain- and agent-agnostic family of structured protocols for agent-agent communication, coordination, and error handling. ACPs combine (i) persistent execution blueprints -- explicit dependency graphs that store intermediate agent outputs -- with (ii) standardized message schemas, enabling robust and fault-tolerant multi-agent collective inference. ACP-powered generalist systems reach state-of-the-art performance: 28.3 % accuracy on AssistantBench for long-horizon web assistance and best-in-class multimodal technical reports, outperforming commercial AI systems in human evaluation. ACPs are highly modular and extensible, allowing practitioners to build top-tier generalist agents quickly.

Text-to-video generation models have shown significant progress in the recent years. However, they still struggle with generating complex dynamic scenes based on compositional text prompts, such as attribute binding for multiple objects, temporal dynamics associated with different objects, and interactions between objects. Our key motivation is that complex tasks can be decomposed into simpler ones, each handled by a role-specialized MLLM agent. Multiple agents can collaborate together to achieve collective intelligence for complex goals. We propose GenMAC, an iterative, multi-agent framework that enables compositional text-to-video generation. The collaborative workflow includes three stages: Design, Generation, and Redesign, with an iterative loop between the Generation and Redesign stages to progressively verify and refine the generated videos. The Redesign stage is the most challenging stage that aims to verify the generated videos, suggest corrections, and redesign the text prompts, frame-wise layouts, and guidance scales for the next iteration of generation. To avoid hallucination of a single MLLM agent, we decompose this stage to four sequentially-executed MLLM-based agents: verification agent, suggestion agent, correction agent, and output structuring agent. Furthermore, to tackle diverse scenarios of compositional text-to-video generation, we design a self-routing mechanism to adaptively select the proper correction agent from a collection of correction agents each specialized for one scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GenMAC, achieving state-of-the art performance in compositional text-to-video generation.

A multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent can receive instructions, capture images, retrieve histories from memory, and decide which tools to use. Nonetheless, red-teaming efforts have revealed that adversarial images/prompts can jailbreak an MLLM and cause unaligned behaviors. In this work, we report an even more severe safety issue in multi-agent environments, referred to as infectious jailbreak. It entails the adversary simply jailbreaking a single agent, and without any further intervention from the adversary, (almost) all agents will become infected exponentially fast and exhibit harmful behaviors. To validate the feasibility of infectious jailbreak, we simulate multi-agent environments containing up to one million LLaVA-1.5 agents, and employ randomized pair-wise chat as a proof-of-concept instantiation for multi-agent interaction. Our results show that feeding an (infectious) adversarial image into the memory of any randomly chosen agent is sufficient to achieve infectious jailbreak. Finally, we derive a simple principle for determining whether a defense mechanism can provably restrain the spread of infectious jailbreak, but how to design a practical defense that meets this principle remains an open question to investigate. Our project page is available at https://sail-sg.github.io/Agent-Smith/.

Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on tau-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source both the synthetic data collected and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models are available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4 and project website is https://apigen-mt.github.io

Artificial intelligence requires deliberate reasoning, temporal awareness, and effective constraint management, capabilities traditional LLMs often lack due to their reliance on pattern matching, limited self-verification, and inconsistent constraint handling. We introduce Multi-Agent Collaborative Intelligence (MACI), a framework comprising three key components: 1) a meta-planner (MP) that identifies, formulates, and refines all roles and constraints of a task (e.g., wedding planning) while generating a dependency graph, with common-sense augmentation to ensure realistic and practical constraints; 2) a collection of agents to facilitate planning and address task-specific requirements; and 3) a run-time monitor that manages plan adjustments as needed. By decoupling planning from validation, maintaining minimal agent context, and integrating common-sense reasoning, MACI overcomes the aforementioned limitations and demonstrates robust performance in two scheduling problems.

The latest breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs), eg., ChatDev, have catalyzed profound transformations, particularly through multi-agent collaboration for software development. LLM agents can collaborate in teams like humans, and follow the waterfall model to sequentially work on requirements analysis, development, review, testing, and other phases to perform autonomous software generation. However, for an agent team, each phase in a single development process yields only one possible outcome. This results in the completion of only one development chain, thereby losing the opportunity to explore multiple potential decision paths within the solution space. Consequently, this may lead to obtaining suboptimal results. To address this challenge, we introduce Cross-Team Collaboration (CTC), a scalable multi-team framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various decisions and communicate with their insights in a cross-team collaboration environment for superior content generation. Experimental results in software development reveal a notable increase in quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines, underscoring the efficacy of our framework. The significant improvements in story generation demonstrate the promising generalization ability of our framework across various domains. We anticipate that our work will guide LLM agents towards a cross-team paradigm and contribute to their significant growth in but not limited to software development. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for obtaining high-performance policies. However, the safety of these policies has been a long-standing issue. One promising paradigm to guarantee safety is a shield, which shields a policy from making unsafe actions. However, computing a shield scales exponentially in the number of state variables. This is a particular concern in multi-agent systems with many agents. In this work, we propose a novel approach for multi-agent shielding. We address scalability by computing individual shields for each agent. The challenge is that typical safety specifications are global properties, but the shields of individual agents only ensure local properties. Our key to overcome this challenge is to apply assume-guarantee reasoning. Specifically, we present a sound proof rule that decomposes a (global, complex) safety specification into (local, simple) obligations for the shields of the individual agents. Moreover, we show that applying the shields during reinforcement learning significantly improves the quality of the policies obtained for a given training budget. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our multi-agent shielding framework in two case studies, reducing the computation time from hours to seconds and achieving fast learning convergence.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods struggle with the non-stationarity of multi-agent systems and fail to adaptively learn online when tested with novel agents. Here, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to create an autonomous agent that can handle these challenges. Our agent, Hypothetical Minds, consists of a cognitively-inspired architecture, featuring modular components for perception, memory, and hierarchical planning over two levels of abstraction. We introduce the Theory of Mind module that scaffolds the high-level planning process by generating hypotheses about other agents' strategies in natural language. It then evaluates and iteratively refines these hypotheses by reinforcing hypotheses that make correct predictions about the other agents' behavior. Hypothetical Minds significantly improves performance over previous LLM-agent and RL baselines on a range of competitive, mixed motive, and collaborative domains in the Melting Pot benchmark, including both dyadic and population-based environments. Additionally, comparisons against LLM-agent baselines and ablations reveal the importance of hypothesis evaluation and refinement for succeeding on complex scenarios.

We consider the problem of multi-agent navigation and collision avoidance when observations are limited to the local neighborhood of each agent. We propose InforMARL, a novel architecture for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) which uses local information intelligently to compute paths for all the agents in a decentralized manner. Specifically, InforMARL aggregates information about the local neighborhood of agents for both the actor and the critic using a graph neural network and can be used in conjunction with any standard MARL algorithm. We show that (1) in training, InforMARL has better sample efficiency and performance than baseline approaches, despite using less information, and (2) in testing, it scales well to environments with arbitrary numbers of agents and obstacles. We illustrate these results using four task environments, including one with predetermined goals for each agent, and one in which the agents collectively try to cover all goals. Code available at https://github.com/nsidn98/InforMARL.

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance difference lemma that characterizes the landscape of multi-agent policy optimization, we find that the localized action value function serves as an ideal descent direction for each local policy. Motivated by the observation, we present a multi-agent PPO algorithm in which the local policy of each agent is updated similarly to vanilla PPO. We prove that with standard regularity conditions on the Markov game and problem-dependent quantities, our algorithm converges to the globally optimal policy at a sublinear rate. We extend our algorithm to the off-policy setting and introduce pessimism to policy evaluation, which aligns with experiments. To our knowledge, this is the first provably convergent multi-agent PPO algorithm in cooperative Markov games.

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has drawn attention to their potential for accelerating drug discovery. However, a central problem remains: translating theoretical ideas into robust implementations in the highly specialized context of pharmaceutical research. This limitation prevents practitioners from making full use of the latest AI developments in drug discovery. To address this challenge, we introduce DrugAgent, a multi-agent framework that automates machine learning (ML) programming for drug discovery tasks. DrugAgent employs an LLM Planner that formulates high-level ideas and an LLM Instructor that identifies and integrates domain knowledge when implementing those ideas. We present case studies on three representative drug discovery tasks. Our results show that DrugAgent consistently outperforms leading baselines, including a relative improvement of 4.92% in ROC-AUC compared to ReAct for drug-target interaction (DTI). DrugAgent is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/drugagent-5C42/.

Sora is the first large-scale generalist video generation model that garnered significant attention across society. Since its launch by OpenAI in February 2024, no other video generation models have paralleled {Sora}'s performance or its capacity to support a broad spectrum of video generation tasks. Additionally, there are only a few fully published video generation models, with the majority being closed-source. To address this gap, this paper proposes a new multi-agent framework Mora, which incorporates several advanced visual AI agents to replicate generalist video generation demonstrated by Sora. In particular, Mora can utilize multiple visual agents and successfully mimic Sora's video generation capabilities in various tasks, such as (1) text-to-video generation, (2) text-conditional image-to-video generation, (3) extend generated videos, (4) video-to-video editing, (5) connect videos and (6) simulate digital worlds. Our extensive experimental results show that Mora achieves performance that is proximate to that of Sora in various tasks. However, there exists an obvious performance gap between our work and Sora when assessed holistically. In summary, we hope this project can guide the future trajectory of video generation through collaborative AI agents.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has emerged as a promising solution for learning complex and scalable coordination behaviors in multi-robot systems. However, established MARL platforms (e.g., SMAC and MPE) lack robotics relevance and hardware deployment, leaving multi-robot learning researchers to develop bespoke environments and hardware testbeds dedicated to the development and evaluation of their individual contributions. The Multi-Agent RL Benchmark and Learning Environment for the Robotarium (MARBLER) is an exciting recent step in providing a standardized robotics-relevant platform for MARL, by bridging the Robotarium testbed with existing MARL software infrastructure. However, MARBLER lacks support for parallelization and GPU/TPU execution, making the platform prohibitively slow compared to modern MARL environments and hindering adoption. We contribute JaxRobotarium, a Jax-powered end-to-end simulation, learning, deployment, and benchmarking platform for the Robotarium. JaxRobotarium enables rapid training and deployment of multi-robot RL (MRRL) policies with realistic robot dynamics and safety constraints, supporting parallelization and hardware acceleration. Our generalizable learning interface integrates easily with SOTA MARL libraries (e.g., JaxMARL). In addition, JaxRobotarium includes eight standardized coordination scenarios, including four novel scenarios that bring established MARL benchmark tasks (e.g., RWARE and Level-Based Foraging) to a robotics setting. We demonstrate that JaxRobotarium retains high simulation fidelity while achieving dramatic speedups over baseline (20x in training and 150x in simulation), and provides an open-access sim-to-real evaluation pipeline through the Robotarium testbed, accelerating and democratizing access to multi-robot learning research and evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/GT-STAR-Lab/JaxRobotarium.

The development of artificial intelligence systems is transitioning from creating static, task-specific models to dynamic, agent-based systems capable of performing well in a wide range of applications. We propose an Interactive Agent Foundation Model that uses a novel multi-task agent training paradigm for training AI agents across a wide range of domains, datasets, and tasks. Our training paradigm unifies diverse pre-training strategies, including visual masked auto-encoders, language modeling, and next-action prediction, enabling a versatile and adaptable AI framework. We demonstrate the performance of our framework across three separate domains -- Robotics, Gaming AI, and Healthcare. Our model demonstrates its ability to generate meaningful and contextually relevant outputs in each area. The strength of our approach lies in its generality, leveraging a variety of data sources such as robotics sequences, gameplay data, large-scale video datasets, and textual information for effective multimodal and multi-task learning. Our approach provides a promising avenue for developing generalist, action-taking, multimodal systems.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently excelled in solving challenging cooperative and competitive multi-agent problems in various environments with, mostly, few agents and full observability. Moreover, a range of crucial robotics-related tasks, such as multi-robot navigation and obstacle avoidance, that have been conventionally approached with the classical non-learnable methods (e.g., heuristic search) is currently suggested to be solved by the learning-based or hybrid methods. Still, in this domain, it is hard, not to say impossible, to conduct a fair comparison between classical, learning-based, and hybrid approaches due to the lack of a unified framework that supports both learning and evaluation. To this end, we introduce POGEMA, a set of comprehensive tools that includes a fast environment for learning, a generator of problem instances, the collection of pre-defined ones, a visualization toolkit, and a benchmarking tool that allows automated evaluation. We introduce and specify an evaluation protocol defining a range of domain-related metrics computed on the basics of the primary evaluation indicators (such as success rate and path length), allowing a fair multi-fold comparison. The results of such a comparison, which involves a variety of state-of-the-art MARL, search-based, and hybrid methods, are presented.

Theory of mind (ToM; Premack & Woodruff, 1978) broadly refers to humans' ability to represent the mental states of others, including their desires, beliefs, and intentions. We propose to train a machine to build such models too. We design a Theory of Mind neural network -- a ToMnet -- which uses meta-learning to build models of the agents it encounters, from observations of their behaviour alone. Through this process, it acquires a strong prior model for agents' behaviour, as well as the ability to bootstrap to richer predictions about agents' characteristics and mental states using only a small number of behavioural observations. We apply the ToMnet to agents behaving in simple gridworld environments, showing that it learns to model random, algorithmic, and deep reinforcement learning agents from varied populations, and that it passes classic ToM tasks such as the "Sally-Anne" test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) of recognising that others can hold false beliefs about the world. We argue that this system -- which autonomously learns how to model other agents in its world -- is an important step forward for developing multi-agent AI systems, for building intermediating technology for machine-human interaction, and for advancing the progress on interpretable AI.

Due to the dynamic and unpredictable open-world setting, navigating complex environments in Minecraft poses significant challenges for multi-agent systems. Agents must interact with the environment and coordinate their actions with other agents to achieve common objectives. However, traditional approaches often struggle to efficiently manage inter-agent communication and task distribution, crucial for effective multi-agent navigation. Furthermore, processing and integrating multi-modal information (such as visual, textual, and auditory data) is essential for agents to comprehend their goals and navigate the environment successfully and fully. To address this issue, we design the HAS framework to auto-organize groups of LLM-based agents to complete navigation tasks. In our approach, we devise a hierarchical auto-organizing navigation system, which is characterized by 1) a hierarchical system for multi-agent organization, ensuring centralized planning and decentralized execution; 2) an auto-organizing and intra-communication mechanism, enabling dynamic group adjustment under subtasks; 3) a multi-modal information platform, facilitating multi-modal perception to perform the three navigation tasks with one system. To assess organizational behavior, we design a series of navigation tasks in the Minecraft environment, which includes searching and exploring. We aim to develop embodied organizations that push the boundaries of embodied AI, moving it towards a more human-like organizational structure.

We study multi-agent reinforcement learning in the setting of episodic Markov decision processes, where multiple agents cooperate via communication through a central server. We propose a provably efficient algorithm based on value iteration that enable asynchronous communication while ensuring the advantage of cooperation with low communication overhead. With linear function approximation, we prove that our algorithm enjoys an mathcal{O}(d^{3/2}H^2K) regret with mathcal{O}(dHM^2) communication complexity, where d is the feature dimension, H is the horizon length, M is the total number of agents, and K is the total number of episodes. We also provide a lower bound showing that a minimal Omega(dM) communication complexity is required to improve the performance through collaboration.

Virtual film production requires intricate decision-making processes, including scriptwriting, virtual cinematography, and precise actor positioning and actions. Motivated by recent advances in automated decision-making with language agent-based societies, this paper introduces FilmAgent, a novel LLM-based multi-agent collaborative framework for end-to-end film automation in our constructed 3D virtual spaces. FilmAgent simulates various crew roles, including directors, screenwriters, actors, and cinematographers, and covers key stages of a film production workflow: (1) idea development transforms brainstormed ideas into structured story outlines; (2) scriptwriting elaborates on dialogue and character actions for each scene; (3) cinematography determines the camera setups for each shot. A team of agents collaborates through iterative feedback and revisions, thereby verifying intermediate scripts and reducing hallucinations. We evaluate the generated videos on 15 ideas and 4 key aspects. Human evaluation shows that FilmAgent outperforms all baselines across all aspects and scores 3.98 out of 5 on average, showing the feasibility of multi-agent collaboration in filmmaking. Further analysis reveals that FilmAgent, despite using the less advanced GPT-4o model, surpasses the single-agent o1, showing the advantage of a well-coordinated multi-agent system. Lastly, we discuss the complementary strengths and weaknesses of OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora and our FilmAgent in filmmaking.

Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting entities evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynamics of communicating cells or physical particles. Learning the dynamics of such systems is essential for predicting the temporal evolution of populations across novel samples and unseen environments. Flow-based models allow for learning these dynamics at the population level - they model the evolution of the entire distribution of samples. However, current flow-based models are limited to a single initial population and a set of predefined conditions which describe different dynamics. We argue that multiple processes in natural sciences have to be represented as vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold of probability densities. That is, the change of the population at any moment in time depends on the population itself due to the interactions between samples. In particular, this is crucial for personalized medicine where the development of diseases and their respective treatment response depends on the microenvironment of cells specific to each patient. We propose Meta Flow Matching (MFM), a practical approach to integrating along these vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold by amortizing the flow model over the initial populations. Namely, we embed the population of samples using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and use these embeddings to train a Flow Matching model. This gives MFM the ability to generalize over the initial distributions unlike previously proposed methods. We demonstrate the ability of MFM to improve prediction of individual treatment responses on a large scale multi-patient single-cell drug screen dataset.

In the field of MLLM-based GUI agents, compared to smartphones, the PC scenario not only features a more complex interactive environment, but also involves more intricate intra- and inter-app workflows. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical agent framework named PC-Agent. Specifically, from the perception perspective, we devise an Active Perception Module (APM) to overcome the inadequate abilities of current MLLMs in perceiving screenshot content. From the decision-making perspective, to handle complex user instructions and interdependent subtasks more effectively, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent collaboration architecture that decomposes decision-making processes into Instruction-Subtask-Action levels. Within this architecture, three agents (i.e., Manager, Progress and Decision) are set up for instruction decomposition, progress tracking and step-by-step decision-making respectively. Additionally, a Reflection agent is adopted to enable timely bottom-up error feedback and adjustment. We also introduce a new benchmark PC-Eval with 25 real-world complex instructions. Empirical results on PC-Eval show that our PC-Agent achieves a 32% absolute improvement of task success rate over previous state-of-the-art methods. The code will be publicly available.

Building an embodied agent system with a large language model (LLM) as its core is a promising direction. Due to the significant costs and uncontrollable factors associated with deploying and training such agents in the real world, we have decided to begin our exploration within the Minecraft environment. Our STEVE Series agents can complete basic tasks in a virtual environment and more challenging tasks such as navigation and even creative tasks, with an efficiency far exceeding previous state-of-the-art methods by a factor of 2.5times to 7.3times. We begin our exploration with a vanilla large language model, augmenting it with a vision encoder and an action codebase trained on our collected high-quality dataset STEVE-21K. Subsequently, we enhanced it with a Critic and memory to transform it into a complex system. Finally, we constructed a hierarchical multi-agent system. Our recent work explored how to prune the agent system through knowledge distillation. In the future, we will explore more potential applications of STEVE agents in the real world.

This paper proposes a query-level meta-agent named FlowReasoner to automate the design of query-level multi-agent systems, i.e., one system per user query. Our core idea is to incentivize a reasoning-based meta-agent via external execution feedback. Concretely, by distilling DeepSeek R1, we first endow the basic reasoning ability regarding the generation of multi-agent systems to FlowReasoner. Then, we further enhance it via reinforcement learning (RL) with external execution feedback. A multi-purpose reward is designed to guide the RL training from aspects of performance, complexity, and efficiency. In this manner, FlowReasoner is enabled to generate a personalized multi-agent system for each user query via deliberative reasoning. Experiments on both engineering and competition code benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of FlowReasoner. Remarkably, it surpasses o1-mini by 10.52% accuracy across three benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/FlowReasoner.

Modern AI agents, driven by advances in large foundation models, promise to enhance our productivity and transform our lives by augmenting our knowledge and capabilities. To achieve this vision, AI agents must effectively plan, perform multi-step reasoning and actions, respond to novel observations, and recover from errors, to successfully complete complex tasks across a wide range of scenarios. In this work, we introduce Magentic-One, a high-performing open-source agentic system for solving such tasks. Magentic-One uses a multi-agent architecture where a lead agent, the Orchestrator, plans, tracks progress, and re-plans to recover from errors. Throughout task execution, the Orchestrator directs other specialized agents to perform tasks as needed, such as operating a web browser, navigating local files, or writing and executing Python code. We show that Magentic-One achieves statistically competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on three diverse and challenging agentic benchmarks: GAIA, AssistantBench, and WebArena. Magentic-One achieves these results without modification to core agent capabilities or to how they collaborate, demonstrating progress towards generalist agentic systems. Moreover, Magentic-One's modular design allows agents to be added or removed from the team without additional prompt tuning or training, easing development and making it extensible to future scenarios. We provide an open-source implementation of Magentic-One, and we include AutoGenBench, a standalone tool for agentic evaluation. AutoGenBench provides built-in controls for repetition and isolation to run agentic benchmarks in a rigorous and contained manner -- which is important when agents' actions have side-effects. Magentic-One, AutoGenBench and detailed empirical performance evaluations of Magentic-One, including ablations and error analysis are available at https://aka.ms/magentic-one

With the development of LLMs as agents, there is a growing interest in connecting multiple agents into multi-agent systems to solve tasks concurrently, focusing on their role in task assignment and coordination. This paper explores how LLMs can effectively allocate computational tasks among multiple agents, considering factors such as cost, efficiency, and performance. In this work, we address key questions, including the effectiveness of LLMs as orchestrators and planners, comparing their effectiveness in task assignment and coordination. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs can achieve high validity and accuracy in resource allocation tasks. We find that the planner method outperforms the orchestrator method in handling concurrent actions, resulting in improved efficiency and better utilization of agents. Additionally, we show that providing explicit information about worker capabilities enhances the allocation strategies of planners, particularly when dealing with suboptimal workers.

Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) are revolutionizing transportation by reducing human intervention, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing safety. Large Language Models (LLMs), known for their exceptional planning and reasoning capabilities, have been integrated into ADSs to assist with driving decision-making. However, LLM-based single-agent ADSs face three major challenges: limited perception, insufficient collaboration, and high computational demands. To address these issues, recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent ADSs have focused on improving inter-agent communication and cooperation. This paper provides a frontier survey of LLM-based multi-agent ADSs. We begin with a background introduction to related concepts, followed by a categorization of existing LLM-based approaches based on different agent interaction modes. We then discuss agent-human interactions in scenarios where LLM-based agents engage with humans. Finally, we summarize key applications, datasets, and challenges in this field to support future research (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LLM-based_Multi-agent_ADS-3A5C/README.md).

Multi-agent frameworks powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great success in automated planning and task execution. However, the effective adjustment of Agentic workflows during execution has not been well-studied. A effective workflow adjustment is crucial, as in many real-world scenarios, the initial plan must adjust to unforeseen challenges and changing conditions in real-time to ensure the efficient execution of complex tasks. In this paper, we define workflows as an activity-on-vertex (AOV) graphs. We continuously refine the workflow by dynamically adjusting task allocations based on historical performance and previous AOV with LLM agents. To further enhance system performance, we emphasize modularity in workflow design based on measuring parallelism and dependence complexity. Our proposed multi-agent framework achieved efficient sub-task concurrent execution, goal achievement, and error tolerance. Empirical results across different practical tasks demonstrate dramatic improvements in the efficiency of multi-agent frameworks through dynamic workflow updating and modularization.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive accomplishments in both reasoning and planning, their abilities in multi-agent collaborations remains largely unexplored. This study evaluates LLM-based agents in a multi-agent cooperative text game with Theory of Mind (ToM) inference tasks, comparing their performance with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) and planning-based baselines. We observed evidence of emergent collaborative behaviors and high-order Theory of Mind capabilities among LLM-based agents. Our results reveal limitations in LLM-based agents' planning optimization due to systematic failures in managing long-horizon contexts and hallucination about the task state. We explore the use of explicit belief state representations to mitigate these issues, finding that it enhances task performance and the accuracy of ToM inferences for LLM-based agents.

In this paper we introduce ResearchCodeAgent, a novel multi-agent system leveraging large language models (LLMs) agents to automate the codification of research methodologies described in machine learning literature. The system bridges the gap between high-level research concepts and their practical implementation, allowing researchers auto-generating code of existing research papers for benchmarking or building on top-of existing methods specified in the literature with availability of partial or complete starter code. ResearchCodeAgent employs a flexible agent architecture with a comprehensive action suite, enabling context-aware interactions with the research environment. The system incorporates a dynamic planning mechanism, utilizing both short and long-term memory to adapt its approach iteratively. We evaluate ResearchCodeAgent on three distinct machine learning tasks with distinct task complexity and representing different parts of the ML pipeline: data augmentation, optimization, and data batching. Our results demonstrate the system's effectiveness and generalizability, with 46.9% of generated code being high-quality and error-free, and 25% showing performance improvements over baseline implementations. Empirical analysis shows an average reduction of 57.9% in coding time compared to manual implementation. We observe higher gains for more complex tasks. ResearchCodeAgent represents a significant step towards automating the research implementation process, potentially accelerating the pace of machine learning research.

In this study, we introduce "CosmoAgent," an innovative artificial intelligence framework utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate complex interactions between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, with a special emphasis on Stephen Hawking's cautionary advice about not sending radio signals haphazardly into the universe. The goal is to assess the feasibility of peaceful coexistence while considering potential risks that could threaten well-intentioned civilizations. Employing mathematical models and state transition matrices, our approach quantitatively evaluates the development trajectories of civilizations, offering insights into future decision-making at critical points of growth and saturation. Furthermore, the paper acknowledges the vast diversity in potential living conditions across the universe, which could foster unique cosmologies, ethical codes, and worldviews among various civilizations. Recognizing the Earth-centric bias inherent in current LLM designs, we propose the novel concept of using LLMs with diverse ethical paradigms and simulating interactions between entities with distinct moral principles. This innovative research provides a new way to understand complex inter-civilizational dynamics, expanding our perspective while pioneering novel strategies for conflict resolution, crucial for preventing interstellar conflicts. We have also released the code and datasets to enable further academic investigation into this interesting area of research. The code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AlienAgent.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains. However, designing high-performing agentic systems remains challenging. Existing agent search methods suffer from three major limitations: (1) an emphasis on optimizing agentic workflows while under-utilizing proven human-designed components such as memory, planning, and tool use; (2) high evaluation costs, as each newly generated agent must be fully evaluated on benchmarks; and (3) inefficient search in large search space. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. First, We propose a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components, enabling richer agentic system designs. Building on this structured design space, we introduce a predictive value model that estimates agent performance given agentic system and task description, allowing for efficient, low-cost evaluation during the search process. Finally, we present a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy informed by uncertainty to guide the search. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering embodied, math, web, tool, and game, show that our method achieves an average performance gain of 8.34\% over state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits faster search progress with steeper improvement trajectories. Code repo is available at https://github.com/Ericccc02/AgentSwift.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant potential in addressing complex cooperative tasks across various real-world applications. However, existing MARL approaches often rely on the restrictive assumption that the number of entities (e.g., agents, obstacles) remains constant between training and inference. This overlooks scenarios where entities are dynamically removed or added during the inference trajectory -- a common occurrence in real-world environments like search and rescue missions and dynamic combat situations. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of intra-trajectory dynamic entity composition under zero-shot out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, where such dynamic changes cannot be anticipated beforehand. Our empirical studies reveal that existing MARL methods suffer significant performance degradation and increased uncertainty in these scenarios. In response, we propose FlickerFusion, a novel OOD generalization method that acts as a universally applicable augmentation technique for MARL backbone methods. FlickerFusion stochastically drops out parts of the observation space, emulating being in-domain when inferenced OOD. The results show that FlickerFusion not only achieves superior inference rewards but also uniquely reduces uncertainty vis-\`a-vis the backbone, compared to existing methods. Benchmarks, implementations, and model weights are organized and open-sourced at flickerfusion305.github.io, accompanied by ample demo video renderings.

The study of social emergence has long been a central focus in social science. Traditional modeling approaches, such as rule-based Agent-Based Models (ABMs), struggle to capture the diversity and complexity of human behavior, particularly the irrational factors emphasized in behavioral economics. Recently, large language model (LLM) agents have gained traction as simulation tools for modeling human behavior in social science and role-playing applications. Studies suggest that LLMs can account for cognitive biases, emotional fluctuations, and other non-rational influences, enabling more realistic simulations of socio-economic dynamics. In this work, we introduce TwinMarket, a novel multi-agent framework that leverages LLMs to simulate socio-economic systems. Specifically, we examine how individual behaviors, through interactions and feedback mechanisms, give rise to collective dynamics and emergent phenomena. Through experiments in a simulated stock market environment, we demonstrate how individual actions can trigger group behaviors, leading to emergent outcomes such as financial bubbles and recessions. Our approach provides valuable insights into the complex interplay between individual decision-making and collective socio-economic patterns.

Multi-agent collaboration with Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates proficiency in basic tasks, yet its efficiency in more complex scenarios remains unexplored. In gaming environments, these agents often face situations without established coordination protocols, requiring them to make intelligent inferences about teammates from limited data. This problem motivates the area of ad hoc teamwork, in which an agent may potentially cooperate with a variety of teammates to achieve a shared goal. Our study focuses on the ad hoc teamwork problem where the agent operates in an environment driven by natural language. Our findings reveal the potential of LLM agents in team collaboration, highlighting issues related to hallucinations in communication. To address this issue, we develop CodeAct, a general agent that equips LLM with enhanced memory and code-driven reasoning, enabling the repurposing of partial information for rapid adaptation to new teammates.