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arXiv · 2408.00989

On the Resilience of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration with Faulty Agents

Jen-tse Huang·Jiaxu Zhou·Tailin Jin·Xuhui Zhou·Zixi Chen·Wenxuan Wang·Youliang Yuan·Michael R. Lyu·Maarten Sap
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Abstract

Large language model-based multi-agent systems have shown great abilities across various tasks due to the collaboration of expert agents, each focusing on a specific domain. However, the impact of clumsy or even malicious agents--those who frequently make errors in their tasks--on the overall performance of the system remains underexplored. This paper investigates: (1) What is the resilience of various system structures (e.g., A$\rightarrow$B$\rightarrow$C, A$\leftrightarrow$B$\leftrightarrow$C) under faulty agents, on different downstream tasks? (2) How can we increase system resilience to defend against these agents? To simulate faulty agents, we propose two approaches--AutoTransform and AutoInject--which introduce mistakes into the agents' responses. Experiments on four downstream tasks using six systems show that the "hierarchical" structure, i.e., A$\rightarrow$(B$\leftrightarrow$C), exhibits superior resilience with the lowest performance drop of 5.5%, compared to 10.5% and 23.7% of other two structures. To further improve resilience, we introduce (1) Challenger, that introduces a mechanism for each agent to challenge others' outputs, and (2) Inspector, an additional agent to review and correct messages, recovering up to 96.4% errors made by faulty agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CUHK-ARISE/MAS-Resilience.

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Jen-tse Huang, Jiaxu Zhou, Tailin Jin, Xuhui Zhou, Zixi Chen, Wenxuan Wang, Youliang Yuan, Michael R. Lyu, Maarten Sap. 2024-08-02. On the Resilience of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration with Faulty Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00989

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