用信息论解释为何多智能体系统靠多样性提升性能,而非单纯增加数量。
Understanding Agent Scaling in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems via Diversity
- 基于信息论框架,发现性能受任务固有不确定性限制。
- 2个异构智能体性能超过16个同质智能体,效果显著提升。
- 提出新指标K*量化有效通道数,指导高效智能体设计。
基于大模型的多智能体系统(MAS)已成为解决单个大模型难以应对复杂任务的有前景方法。自然策略是通过增加智能体数量来提升性能,但研究发现,在同质设置下,这种扩展呈现强烈递减收益;而引入异质性(如不同模型、提示或工具)则持续带来显著增益。这引发根本问题:是什么限制了扩展?为何多样性有效?我们提出一个信息论框架,表明MAS性能受限于任务内在不确定性,而非智能体数量。推导出与架构无关的理论边界,显示改进程度取决于系统能访问的有效通道数。同质智能体因输出高度相关而早期饱和,异质智能体则提供互补证据。我们进一步引入K*,一个无需真实标签即可量化有效通道数的指标。实证显示,异构配置始终优于同质扩展:2个异构智能体可达到甚至超越16个同质智能体的性能。结果为通过多样性感知设计高效、鲁棒的MAS提供了原则性指导。代码与数据集见:https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/Agent-Scaling。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a promising approach to tackle complex tasks that are difficult for individual LLMs. A natural strategy is to scale performance by increasing the number of agents; however, we find that such scaling exhibits strong diminishing returns in homogeneous settings, while introducing heterogeneity (e.g., different models, prompts, or tools) continues to yield substantial gains. This raises a fundamental question: what limits scaling, and why does diversity help? We present an information-theoretic framework showing that MAS performance is bounded by the intrinsic task uncertainty, not by agent count. We derive architecture-agnostic bounds demonstrating that improvements depend on how many effective channels the system accesses. Homogeneous agents saturate early because their outputs are strongly correlated, whereas heterogeneous agents contribute complementary evidence. We further introduce $K^*$, an effective channel count that quantifies the number of effective channels without ground-truth labels. Empirically, we show that heterogeneous configurations consistently outperform homogeneous scaling: 2 diverse agents can match or exceed the performance of 16 homogeneous agents. Our results provide principled guidelines for building efficient and robust MAS through diversity-aware design. Code and Dataset are available at the link: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/Agent-Scaling.
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