用因果推理提升小模型协作效率,避免无效动作。
CausalPlan: Empowering Efficient LLM Multi-Agent Collaboration Through Causality-Driven Planning
- 引入因果图模型捕捉动作与环境的因果关系,指导决策。
- 在五项任务中减少无效动作,提升多智能体协作表现。
- 无需微调模型,适合希望提升可解释性的系统设计者。
小型开源大语言模型在协作任务中常因依赖表层相关性而非因果推理,产生不合理的行动。为此,我们提出CausalPlan框架,通过两阶段流程将显式因果推理融入规划过程。核心是结构化因果动作(SCA)模型,从智能体轨迹中学习因果图,捕捉历史动作和当前环境状态对后续决策的影响。该结构用于为LLM生成的动作建议分配因果得分,重加权或替换为因果一致的备选方案。通过将因果知识嵌入决策循环,CausalPlan在不微调模型的前提下,约束规划行为符合干预一致性。我们在Overcooked-AI基准上评估了五个协作任务及四种不同规模的LLM(Gemma-7B、Llama-8B、Qwen-14B、Llama-70B),结果表明,CausalPlan显著减少无效动作,在AI-AI与人机协作场景中均优于强基线,验证了因果驱动规划在提升多智能体系统效率、可解释性与泛化能力上的价值。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model (LLM) agents-especially smaller, open-source models-often produce causally invalid or incoherent actions in collaborative tasks due to their reliance on surface-level correlations rather than grounded causal reasoning. This limitation undermines their performance in terms of coordination and planning in dynamic environments. We address this challenge with CausalPlan, a two-phase framework that integrates explicit structural causal reasoning into the LLM planning process. At the core of CausalPlan is the Structural Causal Action (SCA) model, which learns a causal graph from agent trajectories to capture how prior actions and current environment states influence future decisions. This structure is then used to guide action selection by assigning causal scores to LLM-generated proposals, reweighting them accordingly, or falling back to causally grounded alternatives when needed. By embedding this causal knowledge directly into the decision loop, CausalPlan constrains planning to intervention-consistent behaviours without requiring fine-tuning of the LLM itself. We evaluate CausalPlan on the Overcooked-AI benchmark across five multi-agent coordination tasks and four LLMs of varying sizes: Gemma-7B, Llama-8B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-70B. Experimental results show that CausalPlan consistently reduces invalid actions and improves collaboration in both AI-AI and human-AI settings, outperforming strong reinforcement learning baselines. Our findings highlight the value of causality-driven planning for deploying efficient, interpretable, and generalisable multi-agent LLM systems.
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