Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 1906.02649

A Class of Distributed Event-Triggered Average Consensus Algorithms for Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a class of distributed event-triggered algorithms that solve the average consensus problem in multi-agent systems. By designing events such that a specifically chosen Lyapunov function is monotonically decreasing, event-triggered algorithms succeed in reducing communications among agents while still ensuring that the entire system converges to the desired state. However, depending on the chosen Lyapunov function the transient behaviors can be very different. Moreover, performance requirements also vary from application to application. Consequently, we are instead interested in considering a class of Lyapunov functions such that each Lyapunov function produces a different event-triggered coordination algorithm to solve the multi-agent average consensus problem. The proposed class of algorithms all guarantee exponential convergence of the resulting system and exclusion of Zeno behaviors. This allows us to easily implement different algorithms that all guarantee correctness to meet varying performance needs. We show that our findings can be applied to the practical clock synchronization problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and further corroborate their effectiveness with simulation results.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ping Xu, Cameron Nowzari, Zhi Tian. 2019-11-24. A Class of Distributed Event-Triggered Average Consensus Algorithms for Multi-Agent Systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02649

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

CONCAT: Consensus- and Confidence-Driven Ad Hoc Teaming for Efficient LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Although large language model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS) show their capability to solve complex tasks and achieve higher performance over single agent systems, they lead to huge computational overheads because of heavy communication between agents. Previous research has made efforts to train a sparse multi-agent graph or fine-tune a planner to orchestrate the workflow better. However, such extra training processes introduce computational costs and limit MAS to specific domains, therefore compromising their generalizability. In this paper, we propose CONCAT, a training-free multi-agent collaboration framework based on CONsensus and Confidence-driven Ad hoc Teaming to efficiently organize agent interactions. Specifically, agents are clustered based on their initial answers, and leaders of each cluster are selected based on the agents' confidence. Then, a heuristic function based on the Theory of Mind is designed to predict the collaboration benefits between every two leaders according to their answers and confidence. Finally, an ad hoc multi-agent network is organized after evicting a percentage of communications based on the predicted benefits. Experiments across three LLMs and three benchmarks show that CONCAT achieves up to 2.02x higher efficiency (accuracy/latency ratio) than LLM-Debate and outperforms training-aware methods such as AgentDropout, while reducing average latency by 50.1% on Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct, without any task-specific training.

cs.MA

Bayesian Belief Layer for Controllable Opinion Dynamics in LLM Agents

LLM agents in social simulation revise their opinions implicitly, in context: how open an agent is to persuasion can neither be specified nor verified, and collective outcomes inherit the model's training prior. We introduce Bayesian Chronicle Agents (BCA), a minimal belief layer separating what an agent believes from how it speaks. Each stance is a probability, updated by one Bayesian step per utterance heard. A single prior-strength parameter $κ$ encodes stubbornness, modeled after its role in Friedkin--Johnsen (FJ) opinion dynamics. We then sweep this parameter to yield three canonical regimes of opinion dynamics on demand (consensus, persistent disagreement, committed-minority influence), with persistent disagreement matching the FJ closed-form fixed points at $R^2\!=\!0.93$--$0.99$. We further show that prescribed $κ$ remains recoverable after the language round-trip, with perfect rank-order recovery across all four models. Explicit belief also makes simulation auditable: the layer surfaces systematic per-model stance biases that end-to-end simulation would silently absorb.

cs.MA

When Does Execution Provenance Help Agent Memory Retrieval?

A language agent's execution history can exceed its context window, requiring its memory system to retrieve complete supporting evidence under a hard token budget. Evidence may span multiple execution events, yet conventional retrievers use fixed token windows and fixed-k metrics that reward individual fragments without showing whether the complete evidence set fits in context. Smaller windows reduce irrelevant text but scatter evidence across candidates, while flat-versus-graph comparisons can conflate candidate design with graph propagation. To address these limitations, we formulate agent-memory retrieval as budgeted evidence completion and score exact gold spans in shared source coordinates. We first construct source-aligned provenance units from tool arguments and outputs. We then apply a zero-initialized residual R-GCN to refine frozen dense-retrieval scores over typed provenance edges. We evaluate 2,000 span-grounded memory queries over 1,207 held-out execution-grounded ISETrace trajectories. With matched Dense-FT scoring, provenance units improve Full Support@2048 by 19.07 points over flat 512-token windows and remain 11.96 points above a per-metric oracle over four flat chunk sizes; the pattern also holds with cross-encoder scoring. Holding the candidates and seed scores fixed, graph propagation adds 4.55 points in Full Support@2048 (95% CI [2.98, 6.18]). This gain is concentrated when gold evidence spans multiple events; entity co-occurrence expansion produces no comparable benefit, and relation and topology controls confirm dependence on typed transformations and observed graph structure. Overall, source-aligned candidates address the dominant granularity trade-off, while graph-conditioned propagation adds a smaller, targeted benefit for distributed evidence.

cs.MA