AgentCue: Statistical Summaries for Guiding Decentralized Multi-Agent Self-Organization

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) combine multiple agents to solve complex tasks, and recent MAS scale to more than a thousand agents. At this scale, decentralized MAS remove the central orchestrator that assigns sub-tasks, and the agents, which we call workers, self-organize through their own choices of sub-tasks and collaborators on a shared board. As workers keep adding participation and collaboration records, however, the information explodes: workers spend more and more effort on reading the records of other workers, and self-organization loses efficiency. In the statistical view, we represent the execution history of an MAS by two continually updated networks, a collaboration network among workers and a participation network between workers and task types. We then propose AgentCue, a method built on a new latent space model that places workers and task types in a shared latent space. Each time the networks are updated, the estimated parameters of the latent space model form a compact and interpretable statistical summary, and workers use the statistical summary to choose sub-tasks and collaborators without repeated searches of the shared board. We establish the identifiability of the latent space model and non-asymptotic error bounds for the estimates under network increments, and we show that a fixed number of gradient updates after each network update suffices for the same error rate. Experiments on LongBench v2 Multi-Doc QA show that AgentCue achieves competitive effectiveness, efficiency, and interpretability.