LLM-Powered Decentralized Generative Agents with Adaptive Hierarchical Knowledge Graph for Cooperative Planning
This work addresses a significant problem for researchers and developers in the field of multi-agent systems, particularly those working on cooperative planning and decentralized decision-making, by providing a novel and more efficient approach to achieving long-term goals.
The authors tackled the problem of decentralized multi-agent cooperation in dynamic open-world scenarios, achieving a 63% reduction in steps for two-agent scenarios and a 74% reduction in steps for six-agent scenarios compared to single-agent scenarios. Their proposed framework, DAMCS, outperformed both MARL and LLM baselines in task efficiency and collaboration.
Developing intelligent agents for long-term cooperation in dynamic open-world scenarios is a major challenge in multi-agent systems. Traditional Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frameworks like centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) struggle with scalability and flexibility. They require centralized long-term planning, which is difficult without custom reward functions, and face challenges in processing multi-modal data. CTDE approaches also assume fixed cooperation strategies, making them impractical in dynamic environments where agents need to adapt and plan independently. To address decentralized multi-agent cooperation, we propose Decentralized Adaptive Knowledge Graph Memory and Structured Communication System (DAMCS) in a novel Multi-agent Crafter environment. Our generative agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are more scalable than traditional MARL agents by leveraging external knowledge and language for long-term planning and reasoning. Instead of fully sharing information from all past experiences, DAMCS introduces a multi-modal memory system organized as a hierarchical knowledge graph and a structured communication protocol to optimize agent cooperation. This allows agents to reason from past interactions and share relevant information efficiently. Experiments on novel multi-agent open-world tasks show that DAMCS outperforms both MARL and LLM baselines in task efficiency and collaboration. Compared to single-agent scenarios, the two-agent scenario achieves the same goal with 63% fewer steps, and the six-agent scenario with 74% fewer steps, highlighting the importance of adaptive memory and structured communication in achieving long-term goals. We publicly release our project at: https://happyeureka.github.io/damcs.