Internet of Agents: Weaving a Web of Heterogeneous Agents for
  Collaborative Intelligence
Authors: name: Weize Chen; name: Ziming You; name: Ran Li; name: Yitong Guan; name: Chen Qian; name: Chenyang Zhao; name: Cheng Yang; name: Ruobing Xie; name: Zhiyuan Liu; name: Maosong Sun
Published: 2024-07-09 17:33:24

Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for
the development of highly capable autonomous agents. However, existing
multi-agent frameworks often struggle with integrating diverse capable
third-party agents due to reliance on agents defined within their own
ecosystems. They also face challenges in simulating distributed environments,
as most frameworks are limited to single-device setups. Furthermore, these
frameworks often rely on hard-coded communication pipelines, limiting their
adaptability to dynamic task requirements. Inspired by the concept of the
Internet, we propose the Internet of Agents (IoA), a novel framework that
addresses these limitations by providing a flexible and scalable platform for
LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. IoA introduces an agent integration
protocol, an instant-messaging-like architecture design, and dynamic mechanisms
for agent teaming and conversation flow control. Through extensive experiments
on general assistant tasks, embodied AI tasks, and retrieval-augmented
generation benchmarks, we demonstrate that IoA consistently outperforms
state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing its ability to facilitate effective
collaboration among heterogeneous agents. IoA represents a step towards linking
diverse agents in an Internet-like environment, where agents can seamlessly
collaborate to achieve greater intelligence and capabilities. Our codebase has
been released at https://github.com/OpenBMB/IoA.