提出可解释的通信拓扑分析框架,让大模型多智能体系统通信更透明高效。
Discovering Efficient and Explainable Communication Topologies for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems via Causal Inference

- 将通信拓扑解释转化为因果归因问题,识别关键通信子图。
- 通过掩码测试验证每条通信边对任务结果和响应稳定性的影响。
- 生成轻量解释器,部署后无需重复计算,适合实际应用优化。
大语言模型驱动的多智能体系统性能高度依赖有效的通信拓扑。现有方法通常通过仅基于任务奖励的黑箱优化生成拓扑,虽有效但难以解释为何选择特定通信边,导致无法识别促成协作的关键通信子图。为此,我们提出E2-Explainer,一种模型无关的可解释性框架,用于解释任意拓扑生成器产生的通信结构。具体地,我们将拓扑解释建模为因果归因问题,通过格兰杰式目标衡量每条通信通道被掩码后对任务结果及最终响应稳定性的影响,从而识别出支持任务保全的紧凑通信子图。这些子图经预算约束后被提炼为可复用的解释器,在部署时无需重复进行边级评估,实现高效事后解释。在多个推理与编码基准上的实验证明,E2-Explainer能准确识别维持协作成功的关键通信子图,且可直接执行以裁剪冗余通信边,显著降低通信开销,同时保持竞争性任务性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The performance of large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) largely depends on effective communication topologies. Existing topology generation methods, however, typically learn communication topologies through black-box optimization driven solely by task-level rewards. While effective, such optimization provides little insight into why particular communication edges are selected, making it difficult to identify the critical communication subgraphs responsible for successful collaboration. To address this limitation, we propose E2-Explainer, a model-agnostic framework for providing interpretable explanations of communication topologies produced by arbitrary topology generators. Specifically, we formulate topology explanation as a causal attribution problem that identifies compact communication subgraphs supported by edge-level evidence of task preservation. We obtain this evidence with a Granger-style objective that measures how masking each communication channel changes the task outcome and the stability of the final response. The resulting budgeted subgraphs are then distilled into an amortized explainer, enabling efficient post-hoc explanation without repeated edge-level evaluations at deployment. Extensive experiments on multiple reasoning and coding benchmarks demonstrate that E2-Explainer identifies critical communication subgraphs that preserve successful collaboration. These subgraphs can also be executed directly to prune redundant communication edges, substantially reducing communication costs while maintaining competitive task performance.
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