MAPRO: Recasting Multi-Agent Prompt Optimization as Maximum a Posteriori Inference

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Zhang, Zheyuan, Ge, Lin, Li, Hongjiang, Zhu, Weicheng, Zhang, Chuxu, Ye, Yanfang
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909832241479680
author Zhang, Zheyuan
Ge, Lin
Li, Hongjiang
Zhu, Weicheng
Zhang, Chuxu
Ye, Yanfang
author_facet Zhang, Zheyuan
Ge, Lin
Li, Hongjiang
Zhu, Weicheng
Zhang, Chuxu
Ye, Yanfang
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, and LLM-based agents further extend these abilities to various practical workflows. While recent progress shows that multi-agent systems (MAS) can outperform single agents by coordinating specialized roles, designing effective MAS remains difficult due to prompt sensitivity and the compounded instability MAS creates. To cope with the challenge, recent efforts in automated prompt design have reduced manual effort. However, multi-agent prompt optimization remains largely unexplored. Challenges like exponentially expanding search space and ambiguous credit assignment together make systematic design intractable without principled methods. Therefore, we introduce M}ulti-Agent PRompt Optimization (MAPRO), a four-stage framework that first formulates MAS prompt optimization as a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) inference problem and solves it using a language-guided variant of max-product belief propagation algorithm. To address credit assignment and updates the system iteratively, MAPRO employs a topology-aware refinement mechanism that integrates execution feedback and downstream blames to selectively update agent prompts. Through this process, MAPRO progressively converges to a coordinated set of agent-specific prompt policies. Across benchmarks in various tasks, MAPRO achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently surpassing manually engineered baselines and recent automated alternatives. Beyond performance, our MAP-based formulation also delivers general guidelines for building more reliable and principled multi-agent systems in the future
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07475
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MAPRO: Recasting Multi-Agent Prompt Optimization as Maximum a Posteriori Inference
Zhang, Zheyuan
Ge, Lin
Li, Hongjiang
Zhu, Weicheng
Zhang, Chuxu
Ye, Yanfang
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, and LLM-based agents further extend these abilities to various practical workflows. While recent progress shows that multi-agent systems (MAS) can outperform single agents by coordinating specialized roles, designing effective MAS remains difficult due to prompt sensitivity and the compounded instability MAS creates. To cope with the challenge, recent efforts in automated prompt design have reduced manual effort. However, multi-agent prompt optimization remains largely unexplored. Challenges like exponentially expanding search space and ambiguous credit assignment together make systematic design intractable without principled methods. Therefore, we introduce M}ulti-Agent PRompt Optimization (MAPRO), a four-stage framework that first formulates MAS prompt optimization as a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) inference problem and solves it using a language-guided variant of max-product belief propagation algorithm. To address credit assignment and updates the system iteratively, MAPRO employs a topology-aware refinement mechanism that integrates execution feedback and downstream blames to selectively update agent prompts. Through this process, MAPRO progressively converges to a coordinated set of agent-specific prompt policies. Across benchmarks in various tasks, MAPRO achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently surpassing manually engineered baselines and recent automated alternatives. Beyond performance, our MAP-based formulation also delivers general guidelines for building more reliable and principled multi-agent systems in the future
title MAPRO: Recasting Multi-Agent Prompt Optimization as Maximum a Posteriori Inference
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07475