A survey on LLM-based multi-agent systems: workflow, infrastructure, and challenges

Abstract

The pursuit of more intelligent and credible autonomous systems, akin to human society, has been a long-standing endeavor for humans. Leveraging the exceptional reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have been proposed and have achieved remarkable success across a wide array of tasks. Notably, LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are considered a promising pathway towards realizing general artificial intelligence that is equivalent to or surpasses human-level intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, offering a systematic review of LLM-based MAS. Adhering to the workflow of LLM-based multi-agent systems, we synthesize a general structure encompassing five key components: profile, perception, self-action, mutual interaction, and evolution. This unified framework encapsulates much of the previous work in the field. Furthermore, we illuminate the extensive applications of LLM-based MAS in two principal areas: problem-solving and world simulation. Finally, we discuss in detail several contemporary challenges and provide insights into potential future directions in this domain.