arXiv:2601.17311cs.AI2026-01被引 3

揭示多智能体系统在预算约束下的突变规律,预测其能否协同增效。

Phase Transition for Budgeted Multi-Agent Synergy

  • 基于计算、通信与依赖三重约束,构建可校准的协同理论模型。
  • 发现弱信号能否放大取决于单一参数α_ρ,决定系统是否有效协同。
  • 给出明确预算阈值和组织规则,适用于大模型智能体系统设计。

多智能体系统虽能提升可靠性,但在固定推理预算下常出现增益、饱和甚至崩溃。本文建立一个最小且可校准的理论框架,从现代智能体堆栈的三大关键约束出发:有限上下文窗口、有损跨智能体通信、相似智能体间的共享失败。每个叶智能体由计算-性能缩放指数β表征;通信由消息长度保真度曲线γ(m)刻画;依赖性由有效共享错误相关性ρ描述;上下文窗口W施加硬性输入限制,迫使层级结构必要。针对多数投票的二元成功/失败任务,我们证明了深度b-叉树在相关输入与有损通信下的尖锐相变:单一标量α_ρ(整合γ(m)、ρ与分支因子b)决定弱信号是被放大至非平凡不动点,还是退化为随机水平。在放大区域,我们推导出组织指数s,证明当s>β时,预算内协同增效(即整体表现优于最优单智能体)成立,从而获得闭式计算资源分配规则与明确预算阈值。进一步通过混合深度刻画饱和现象,并提出保守截断预测器,在增长与饱和阶段均保持高精度。连续性能预热情形下,给出星型、链式与树形结构的闭式风险表达,清晰暴露相关性与通信导致的性能下限,揭示平滑环境中的核心设计权衡。最后,在受控合成模拟中验证预测相边界,并说明这些机制如何解释近期大规模匹配预算实验中报告的主要瓶颈。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multi-agent systems can improve reliability, yet under a fixed inference budget they often help, saturate, or even collapse. We develop a minimal and calibratable theory that predicts these regimes from three binding constraints of modern agent stacks: finite context windows, lossy inter-agent communication, and shared failures among similar agents. Each leaf agent is summarized by a compute-performance scaling exponent $β$; communication is captured by a message-length fidelity curve $γ(m)$; dependence is captured by an effective shared-error correlation $ρ$; and a context window $W$ imposes hard fan-in limits that make hierarchy necessary. For binary success/failure tasks with majority aggregation, we prove a sharp phase transition for deep $b$-ary trees with correlated inputs and lossy communication: a single scalar $α_ρ$ (combining $γ(m)$, $ρ$, and fan-in $b$) determines whether weak signal is amplified to a nontrivial fixed point or washed out to chance. In the amplifying regime, we derive an organization exponent $s$ and show that budgeted synergy, i.e., outperforming the best single agent under the same total budget, occurs exactly when $s>β$, yielding closed-form compute allocation rules and explicit budget thresholds. We further characterize saturation via a mixing depth and provide a conservative clipped predictor that remains accurate across growth and saturation. A continuous-performance warm-up gives closed-form risks for star, chain, and tree organizations, making correlation- and communication-induced floors explicit and exposing the core design trade-offs in a smooth setting. Finally, we validate the predicted phase boundaries in controlled synthetic simulations and show how the same mechanisms explain the dominant bottlenecks reported in recent large-scale matched-budget studies of LLM agent-system scaling.

多智能体协同优化大模型

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