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arXiv 2408.08435cs.AI
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智能体系统的自动化设计

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

University of British Columbia(不列颠哥伦比亚大学);Vector Institute(向量研究所)

Shengran Hu, Cong Lu, Jeff Clune

AI总结:

本文提出智能体系统的自动化设计(ADAS)新领域,通过 Meta Agent Search 算法让元智能体用代码迭代编程发现新智能体,实验证明其发明的智能体性能优于手工设计且具跨领域鲁棒性。

摘要:

研究人员正在投入大量精力开发强大的通用智能体,其中 Foundation Models 被用作智能体系统内的模块(例如 Chain-of-Thought、Self-Reflection、Toolformer)。然而,机器学习的历史告诉我们,手工设计的解决方案最终会被学习到的解决方案所取代。我们描述了一个新形成的研究领域,即智能体系统的自动化设计(ADAS),旨在自动创建强大的智能体系统设计,包括发明新的构建模块和/或以新的方式组合它们。我们进一步证明,在 ADAS 中存在一种尚未探索但很有前景的方法,即智能体可以用代码定义,并且可以通过元智能体在代码中编写越来越好的智能体来自动发现新智能体。鉴于编程语言是图灵完备的,这种方法在理论上能够学习任何可能的智能体系统:包括新颖的提示、工具使用、工作流程及其组合。我们提出了一种简单而有效的算法 Meta Agent Search 来证明这一想法,其中元智能体基于不断增长的先前发现档案,迭代地编写有趣的新智能体。通过对包括编程、科学和数学在内的多个领域进行广泛实验,我们表明我们的算法可以逐步发明具有新颖设计的智能体,其性能大大优于最先进的手工设计智能体。重要的是,我们始终观察到令人惊讶的结果,即由 Meta Agent Search 发明的智能体即使在不同领域和模型之间迁移时也能保持卓越的性能,证明了它们的鲁棒性和通用性。只要我们安全地开发它,我们的工作就展示了一个令人兴奋的新研究方向的潜力,即自动设计更强大的智能体系统以造福人类。

英文摘要:

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We describe a newly forming research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, workflows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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