Title: Efficient Multi-Agent System Training with Data Influence-Oriented Tree Search
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Data Influence; LLM-based Multi Agent

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS) show strong potential for tackling complex tasks through collaborative intelligence. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based methods provide promising approaches for enhancing MAS self-training by generating synthetic data, using Q-values to estimate agent contributions. However, relying solely on Q-values may misalign with the goal of selecting data most beneficial for MAS improvement. To address this discrepancy, we propose Data Influence-oriented Tree Search (DITS), a novel framework that incorporates influence scores to guide both tree search and data selection in data synthesis. By leveraging influence scores, we effectively identify the most impactful data for MAS improvement, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we derive a novel influence score estimation method tailored for non-differentiable metrics, significantly reducing computational overhead by calculating performance changes on the validation set. Extensive experiments on three different multi-agent tasks demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed methods. Notably, our findings reveal that allocating more inference resources to estimate influence scores, rather than Q-values, during data synthesis can more effectively and efficiently enhance model training. We will release our code and data in the future.