Learning to Act and Cooperate for Distributed Black-Box Consensus Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qin, Zi-Bo, Wei, Feng-Feng, Chen, Tai-You, Chen, Wei-Neng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Qin, Zi-Bo
Wei, Feng-Feng
Chen, Tai-You
Chen, Wei-Neng
author_facet Qin, Zi-Bo
Wei, Feng-Feng
Chen, Tai-You
Chen, Wei-Neng
contents Distributed blackbox consensus optimization is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems, where agents must improve a global objective using only local objective queries and limited neighbor communication. Existing methods largely rely on handcrafted update rules and static cooperation patterns, which often struggle to balance local adaptation, global coordination, and communication efficiency in heterogeneous nonconvex environments. In this paper, we take an initial step toward trajectory-driven self-design for distributed black-box consensus optimization. We first redesign the agent-level swarm dynamics with an adaptive internal mechanism tailored to decentralized consensus settings, improving the balance between exploration, convergence, and local escape. Built on top of this adaptive execution layer, we propose Learning to Act and Cooperate (LACMAS), a trajectorydriven framework in which large language models provide sparse highlevel guidance for shaping both agentinternal action behaviors and agentexternal cooperation patterns from historical optimization trajectories. We further introduce a phased cognitive scheduling strategy to activate different forms of adaptation in a resource-aware manner. Experiments on standard distributed black-box benchmarks and real-world distributed tasks show that LAC-MAS consistently improves solution quality, convergence efficiency, and communication efficiency over strong baselines, suggesting a practical route from handcrafted distributed coordination toward self-designing multi-agent optimization systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Act and Cooperate for Distributed Black-Box Consensus Optimization
Qin, Zi-Bo
Wei, Feng-Feng
Chen, Tai-You
Chen, Wei-Neng
Multiagent Systems
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Distributed blackbox consensus optimization is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems, where agents must improve a global objective using only local objective queries and limited neighbor communication. Existing methods largely rely on handcrafted update rules and static cooperation patterns, which often struggle to balance local adaptation, global coordination, and communication efficiency in heterogeneous nonconvex environments. In this paper, we take an initial step toward trajectory-driven self-design for distributed black-box consensus optimization. We first redesign the agent-level swarm dynamics with an adaptive internal mechanism tailored to decentralized consensus settings, improving the balance between exploration, convergence, and local escape. Built on top of this adaptive execution layer, we propose Learning to Act and Cooperate (LACMAS), a trajectorydriven framework in which large language models provide sparse highlevel guidance for shaping both agentinternal action behaviors and agentexternal cooperation patterns from historical optimization trajectories. We further introduce a phased cognitive scheduling strategy to activate different forms of adaptation in a resource-aware manner. Experiments on standard distributed black-box benchmarks and real-world distributed tasks show that LAC-MAS consistently improves solution quality, convergence efficiency, and communication efficiency over strong baselines, suggesting a practical route from handcrafted distributed coordination toward self-designing multi-agent optimization systems.
title Learning to Act and Cooperate for Distributed Black-Box Consensus Optimization
topic Multiagent Systems
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00691