1.2MADec 18, 2025
Ev-Trust: An Evolutionary Stable Trust Mechanism for Decentralized LLM-Based Multi-Agent Service EconomiesJiye Wang, Shiduo Yang, Jiayu Qin et al.
Autonomous LLM-based agents are increasingly engaging in decentralized service interactions to collaboratively execute complex tasks. However, the intrinsic instability and low-cost generativity of LLMs introduce a systemic vulnerability, where self-interested agents are incentivized to pursue short-term gains through deceptive behaviors. Such strategies can rapidly proliferate within the population and precipitate a systemic trust collapse. To address this, we propose Ev-Trust, a strategy-equilibrium trust mechanism grounded in evolutionary game theory. Ev-Trust constructs a dynamic feedback loop that couples trust evaluation with evolutionary incentives, embedding interaction history and reputation directly into the agent's expected revenue function. This mechanism fundamentally reshapes the revenue structure, converting trustworthiness into a decisive survival advantage that suppresses short-sightedness. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation based on the Replicator Dynamics, proving the asymptotic stability of Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) that favor cooperation. Experimental results indicate that Ev-Trust effectively eliminates malicious strategies and enhances collective revenue, exhibiting resilience against the invasion of mutant behaviors.
4.9CLFeb 19, 2025
MaskPrune: Mask-based LLM Pruning for Layer-wise Uniform StructuresJiayu Qin, Jianchao Tan, Kefeng Zhang et al.
The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in various language tasks has attracted considerable attention. However, the ever-increasing size of these models presents growing challenges for deployment and inference. Structured pruning, an effective model compression technique, is gaining increasing attention due to its ability to enhance inference efficiency. Nevertheless, most previous optimization-based structured pruning methods sacrifice the uniform structure across layers for greater flexibility to maintain performance. The heterogeneous structure hinders the effective utilization of off-the-shelf inference acceleration techniques and impedes efficient configuration for continued training. To address this issue, we propose a novel masking learning paradigm based on minimax optimization to obtain the uniform pruned structure by optimizing the masks under sparsity regularization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can maintain high performance while ensuring the uniformity of the pruned model structure, thereby outperforming existing SOTA methods.