用强化学习让多个大模型协作,既省成本又控性能。
Controlling Performance and Budget of a Centralized Multi-agent LLM System with Reinforcement Learning
- 中央控制器按需调用专家模型,避免全程调用
- 高预算下超越单个最优模型,低预算仍保持高效
- 支持不同预算下的自适应行为,适合资源受限场景
大型语言模型在不同领域有互补优势且推理成本各异,促使多智能体系统协同设计。现有方法多采用去中心化框架,对每个输入均调用多个LLM,导致推理成本高且不可控。本文提出一种集中式多LLM框架,由控制器选择性调度专家模型,在成本可控的前提下实现高效协作。将协调问题建模为双目标强化学习:最大化任务性能,最小化总推理成本。进一步要求系统在不同预算条件下具备自适应能力。为此提出CoRL框架,在多预算设置下优化性能与成本权衡。在四个不同基准上的实验表明,该系统在高预算下可超越单一最优专家模型,同时在低预算模式下仍保持强性能,验证了集中式协调在可扩展、低成本多智能体系统中的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit complementary strengths across domains and come with varying inference costs, motivating the design of multi-agent LLM systems where specialized models collaborate efficiently. Existing approaches predominantly rely on decentralized frameworks, which invoke multiple LLMs for every input and thus lead to substantial and uncontrolled inference costs. In this work, we introduce a centralized multi-LLM framework, where a controller LLM selectively coordinates a pool of expert models in a cost-efficient and cost-controllable manner. We formulate this coordination problem as reinforcement learning with dual objectives: maximizing task performance while minimizing the overall inference cost. In addition, we expect the multi-agent system to have adapted behavior with different budget conditions during inference. To this end, we propose CoRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes the performance cost trade-off in a controllable multi-budget setting. Experiments on four diverse benchmarks demonstrate that CoRL enables a single system to surpass the best expert LLM under high-budget settings, while maintaining strong performance in more economical low-budget modes, highlighting the effectiveness of centralized coordination for scalable and cost-efficient multi-agent LLM systems.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。