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cs.MA · cs.AI · 2608.12921 · 2026/08/13

Discovering Efficient and Explainable Communication Topologies for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems via Causal Inference

Li, Junzhi, He, Peng, Ji, Qirui, Wang, Wei, Liu, Lixiang, Sun, Chuxiong
TL;DR:给 MAS 通信拓扑做因果归因解释:用 Granger 式目标度量掩码每个通信边对任务结果的影响,抽出紧凑关键通信子图,再蒸馏成摊销解释器。关键子图可直接执行来剪冗余边。

🎯 问题

LLM 多智能体性能依赖通信拓扑,但现有拓扑生成只靠任务奖励做黑盒优化——为什么选这些边、哪些是关键通信子图,完全不可解释。

🔬 方法

E2-Explainer:拓扑解释建模为因果归因问题,用 Granger 式目标找「掩码该边后任务结果/响应稳定性变化」的边级证据;带预算的子图蒸馏成摊销解释器,部署时无需逐边重估。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
Introduction
Related Work
Problem Formulation
E2-Explainer
Experiment
Conclusion
LLM-MAS Communication Graphs · Post-hoc Communication Explanation · Objective and Deployment Constraint · Edge-Level Granger-Style Causal Attribution · Causal Subgraph Extraction · Amortized Subgraph Explainer · Experimental Setup · Results and Analysis · Explainer Input and Output · Budget-Conditioned Explainer Architecture · Graph-to-Subgraph Supervision and Decoding · Causal Supervision Construction Details · Implementation Settings · Dataset and Evaluation Details · Additional Evaluation Protocols · Qualitative Case Studies and Execution Traces · Generalization to Hand-Crafted Communication Topologies · Additional Redundancy Analysis on OFA-MAS

📊 结果

多推理与编程 benchmark 上识别出的关键子图能保持成功协作,且可直接执行剪掉冗余通信边。

💡 与研究方向关联

通信拓扑的稀疏化与可解释性是多智能体系统落地的工程前提,对用户研究多 agent 协同架构是直接工具层贡献。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
The performance of large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) largely depends on effective communication topologies. Existing topology generation methods, however, typically learn communication topologies through black-box optimization driven solely by task-level rewards. While effective, such optimization provides little insight into why particular communication edges are selected, making it difficult to identify the critical communication subgraphs responsible for successful collaboration. To address this limitation, we propose E2-Explainer, a model-agnostic framework for providing interpretable explanations of communication topologies produced by arbitrary topology generators. Specifically, we formulate topology explanation as a causal attribution problem that identifies compact communication subgraphs supported by edge-level evidence of task preservation. We obtain this evidence with a Granger-style objective that measures how masking each communication channel changes the task outcome and the stability of the final response. The resulting budgeted subgraphs are then distilled into an amortized explainer, enabling efficient post-hoc explanation without repeated edge-level evaluations at deployment. Extensive experiments on multiple reasoning and coding benchmarks demonstrate that E2-Explainer identifies critical communication subgraphs that preserve successful collaboration. These subgraphs can also be executed directly to prune redundant communication edges, substantially reducing communication costs while maintaining competitive task performance.
Deep Read · 2026-08-15高松灯 / Agent 日报
Multi-agentTopologyCausal InferenceExplainability