arXiv:2602.03053cs.AIcs.CL2026-02被引 6

研究大模型协作中过程验证的有效性,发现当前方法效果不稳定且难可靠评估。

MAS-ProVe: Understanding the Process Verification of Multi-Agent Systems

  • 对比三种验证范式与五种验证器,测试多智能体系统推理过程
  • 过程验证常无效且波动大,无法稳定提升性能
  • 用大模型当裁判优于奖励模型,但仍有上下文长度的权衡

基于大语言模型(LLM)的多智能体系统(MAS)常表现出推理轨迹的高方差。过程验证通过评估轨迹中的中间步骤,在通用推理场景中展现出潜力,被建议用于指导多智能体协作;然而其在多智能体系统中的实际有效性尚不明确。为此,我们提出MAS-ProVe,对多智能体系统的过程验证进行系统的实证研究。研究涵盖三种验证范式(大模型作为裁判、奖励模型、过程奖励模型),在两种验证粒度(智能体级与迭代级)下评估。进一步考察了五种代表性验证器和四种上下文管理策略,并在六个不同多智能体框架上,多个推理基准上进行实验。结果表明,过程级验证并未持续提升性能,且频繁表现出高方差,凸显了可靠评估部分多智能体轨迹的困难。在所研究方法中,大模型作为裁判通常优于基于奖励的方法,其中训练过的裁判优于通用大模型。我们还观察到,大模型作为裁判与作为单个智能体的性能差距较小,并识别出验证中存在上下文长度与性能之间的权衡。总体而言,我们的结果表明,有效的多智能体系统过程验证仍是开放挑战,需超越现有范式。代码已开源:https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/MAS-ProVe。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit high variance in their reasoning trajectories. Process verification, which evaluates intermediate steps in trajectories, has shown promise in general reasoning settings, and has been suggested as a potential tool for guiding coordination of MAS; however, its actual effectiveness in MAS remains unclear. To fill this gap, we present MAS-ProVe, a systematic empirical study of process verification for multi-agent systems (MAS). Our study spans three verification paradigms (LLM-as-a-Judge, reward models, and process reward models), evaluated across two levels of verification granularity (agent-level and iteration-level). We further examine five representative verifiers and four context management strategies, and conduct experiments over six diverse MAS frameworks on multiple reasoning benchmarks. We find that process-level verification does not consistently improve performance and frequently exhibits high variance, highlighting the difficulty of reliably evaluating partial multi-agent trajectories. Among the methods studied, LLM-as-a-Judge generally outperforms reward-based approaches, with trained judges surpassing general-purpose LLMs. We further observe a small performance gap between LLMs acting as judges and as single agents, and identify a context-length-performance trade-off in verification. Overall, our results suggest that effective and robust process verification for MAS remains an open challenge, requiring further advances beyond current paradigms. Code is available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/MAS-ProVe.

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