Privacy-Enhancing Paradigms within Federated Multi-Agent Systems
This addresses privacy issues in sensitive domains for users of multi-agent systems, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles privacy challenges in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems by proposing Federated MAS and an Embedded Privacy-Enhancing Agents solution, which enhances privacy protection while maintaining strong system performance as demonstrated in experiments.
LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have proven highly effective in solving complex problems by integrating multiple agents, each performing different roles. However, in sensitive domains, they face emerging privacy protection challenges. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Federated MAS, highlighting the fundamental differences between Federated MAS and traditional FL. We then identify key challenges in developing Federated MAS, including: 1) heterogeneous privacy protocols among agents, 2) structural differences in multi-party conversations, and 3) dynamic conversational network structures. To address these challenges, we propose Embedded Privacy-Enhancing Agents (EPEAgent), an innovative solution that integrates seamlessly into the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) phase and the context retrieval stage. This solution minimizes data flows, ensuring that only task-relevant, agent-specific information is shared. Additionally, we design and generate a comprehensive dataset to evaluate the proposed paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EPEAgent effectively enhances privacy protection while maintaining strong system performance. The code will be availiable at https://github.com/ZitongShi/EPEAgent