llm-ma
LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Simulating Strategic and Goal-Oriented Data Marketplaces
Sashihara, Jun, Fujita, Yukihisa, Nakamura, Kota, Kuwahara, Masahiro, Hayashi, Teruaki
Abstract--Data marketplaces, which mediate the purchase and exchange of data from third parties, have attracted growing attention for reducing the cost and effort of data collection while enabling the trading of diverse datasets. However, a systematic understanding of the interactions between market participants, data, and regulations remains limited. T o address this gap, we propose a Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent System (LLM-MAS) for data marketplaces. In our framework, buyer and seller agents powered by LLMs operate with explicit objectives and autonomously perform strategic actions, such as--planning, searching, purchasing, pricing, and updating data. These agents can reason about market dynamics, forecast future demand, and adapt their strategies accordingly. Unlike conventional model-based simulations, which are typically constrained to predefined rules, LLM-MAS supports broader and more adaptive behavior selection through natural language reasoning. We evaluated the framework via simulation experiments using three distribution-based metrics: (1) the number of purchases per dataset, (2) the number of purchases per buyer, and (3) the number of repeated purchases of the same dataset. The results demonstrate that LLM-MAS more faithfully reproduces trading patterns observed in real data marketplaces compared to traditional approaches, and further captures the emergence and evolution of market trends. Data have emerged as a tradable economic resource, and data marketplaces that mediate the purchase and exchange of datasets from third parties have rapidly expanded [1]. These marketplaces streamline data collection that previously required substantial cost and effort, while also providing organizations and researchers with access to diverse, high-quality datasets. As a result, they are increasingly recognized as critical infrastructures that accelerate innovation based on data that were closed within individual organizations [2]. Despite this progress, our understanding of how interactions among market participants, data, and regulations shape market dynamics remains limited. Smooth and efficient data transactions require well-designed and robust data marketplaces [3].
Stop Reducing Responsibility in LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Systems to Local Alignment
Hu, Jinwei, Dong, Yi, Ao, Shuang, Li, Zhuoyun, Wang, Boxuan, Singh, Lokesh, Cheng, Guangliang, Ramchurn, Sarvapali D., Huang, Xiaowei
LLM-powered Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) unlock new potentials in distributed reasoning, collaboration, and task generalization but also introduce additional risks due to unguaranteed agreement, cascading uncertainty, and adversarial vulnerabilities. We argue that ensuring responsible behavior in such systems requires a paradigm shift: from local, superficial agent-level alignment to global, systemic agreement. We conceptualize responsibility not as a static constraint but as a lifecycle-wide property encompassing agreement, uncertainty, and security, each requiring the complementary integration of subjective human-centered values and objective verifiability. Furthermore, a dual-perspective governance framework that combines interdisciplinary design with human-AI collaborative oversight is essential for tracing and ensuring responsibility throughout the lifecycle of LLM-MAS. Our position views LLM-MAS not as loose collections of agents, but as unified, dynamic socio-technical systems that demand principled mechanisms to support each dimension of responsibility and enable ethically aligned, verifiably coherent, and resilient behavior for sustained, system-wide agreement.
On the Importance of Task Complexity in Evaluating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
Tang, Bohan, Liang, Huidong, Jiang, Keyue, Dong, Xiaowen
Large language model multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) offer a promising paradigm for harnessing collective intelligence to achieve more advanced forms of AI behaviour. While recent studies suggest that LLM-MAS can outperform LLM single-agent systems (LLM-SAS) on certain tasks, the lack of systematic experimental designs limits the strength and generality of these conclusions. We argue that a principled understanding of task complexity, such as the degree of sequential reasoning required and the breadth of capabilities involved, is essential for assessing the effectiveness of LLM-MAS in task solving. To this end, we propose a theoretical framework characterising tasks along two dimensions: depth, representing reasoning length, and width, representing capability diversity. We theoretically examine a representative class of LLM-MAS, namely the multi-agent debate system, and empirically evaluate its performance in both discriminative and generative tasks with varying depth and width. Theoretical and empirical results show that the benefit of LLM-MAS over LLM-SAS increases with both task depth and width, and the effect is more pronounced with respect to depth. This clarifies when LLM-MAS are beneficial and provides a principled foundation for designing future LLM-MAS methods and benchmarks.
Attack the Messages, Not the Agents: A Multi-round Adaptive Stealthy Tampering Framework for LLM-MAS
Yan, Bingyu, Zhou, Ziyi, Zhang, Xiaoming, Li, Chaozhuo, Zeng, Ruilin, Qi, Yirui, Wang, Tianbo, Zhang, Litian
Large language model-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) effectively accomplish complex and dynamic tasks through inter-agent communication, but this reliance introduces substantial safety vulnerabilities. Existing attack methods targeting LLM-MAS either compromise agent internals or rely on direct and overt persuasion, which limit their effectiveness, adaptability, and stealthiness. In this paper, we propose MAST, a Multi-round Adaptive Stealthy Tampering framework designed to exploit communication vulnerabilities within the system. MAST integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search with Direct Preference Optimization to train an attack policy model that adaptively generates effective multi-round tampering strategies. Furthermore, to preserve stealthiness, we impose dual semantic and embedding similarity constraints during the tampering process. Comprehensive experiments across diverse tasks, communication architectures, and LLMs demonstrate that MAST consistently achieves high attack success rates while significantly enhancing stealthiness compared to baselines.
Assessing and Enhancing the Robustness of LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems Through Chaos Engineering
--This study explores the application of chaos engineering to enhance the robustness of Large Language Model-Based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) in production-like environments under real-world conditions. LLM-MAS can potentially improve a wide range of tasks, from answering questions and generating content to automating customer support and improving decision-making processes. However, LLM-MAS in production or preproduction environments can be vulnerable to emergent errors or disruptions, such as hallucinations, agent failures, and agent communication failures. This study proposes a chaos engineering framework to proactively identify such vulnerabilities in LLM-MAS, assess and build resilience against them, and ensure reliable performance in critical applications. I NTRODUCTION Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Bing [1], Gemini [2], and ChatGPT [3] have transformed natural language processing (NLP) through innovations such as transformer architectures [4] and large-scale pretraining [5].
Collab-Overcooked: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Models as Collaborative Agents
Sun, Haochen, Zhang, Shuwen, Ren, Lei, Xu, Hao, Fu, Hao, Yuan, Caixia, Wang, Xiaojie
Large language models (LLMs) based agent systems have made great strides in real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. This paper proposes a new LLM-powered Multi-Agent System (LLM-MAS) benchmark, Collab-Overcooked, built on the popular Overcooked-AI game with more applicable and challenging tasks in interactive environments. Collab-Overcooked extends existing benchmarks from two novel perspectives. First, it provides a multi-agent framework supporting diverse tasks and objectives and encourages collaboration through natural language communication. Second, it introduces a spectrum of process-oriented evaluation metrics to assess the fine-grained collaboration capabilities of different LLM agents, a dimension often overlooked in prior work. We conduct extensive experiments over 10 popular LLMs and show that, while the LLMs present a strong ability in goal interpretation, there is a significant discrepancy in active collaboration and continuous adaption that are critical for efficiently fulfilling complicated tasks. Notably, we highlight the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-MAS and provide insights for improving and evaluating LLM-MAS on a unified and open-sourced benchmark. Environments, 30 open-ended tasks, and an integrated evaluation package are now publicly available at https://github.com/YusaeMeow/Collab-Overcooked.
Beyond Self-Talk: A Communication-Centric Survey of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
Yan, Bingyu, Zhang, Xiaoming, Zhang, Litian, Zhang, Lian, Zhou, Ziyi, Miao, Dezhuang, Li, Chaozhuo
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.
Position: Towards a Responsible LLM-empowered Multi-Agent Systems
Hu, Jinwei, Dong, Yi, Ao, Shuang, Li, Zhuoyun, Wang, Boxuan, Singh, Lokesh, Cheng, Guangliang, Ramchurn, Sarvapali D., Huang, Xiaowei
The rise of Agent AI and Large Language Model-powered Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) has underscored the need for responsible and dependable system operation. Tools like LangChain and Retrieval-Augmented Generation have expanded LLM capabilities, enabling deeper integration into MAS through enhanced knowledge retrieval and reasoning. However, these advancements introduce critical challenges: LLM agents exhibit inherent unpredictability, and uncertainties in their outputs can compound across interactions, threatening system stability. To address these risks, a human-centered design approach with active dynamic moderation is essential. Such an approach enhances traditional passive oversight by facilitating coherent inter-agent communication and effective system governance, allowing MAS to achieve desired outcomes more efficiently.
A Survey on LLM-based Multi-Agent System: Recent Advances and New Frontiers in Application
Chen, Shuaihang, Liu, Yuanxing, Han, Wei, Zhang, Weinan, Liu, Ting
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.