Multi$^2$: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Decision-Making with LLM-Based Agents in Interactive Environments

Abstract:A central goal of large language model (LLM) research is to build agentic systems that can plan, act, and adapt through sustained interaction with dynamic environments. While recent LLM-based agents exhibit impressive contextual reasoning, their long-horizon decision-making remains fragile, often suffering from objective drift, where goals and plans drift over extended interactions. We introduce Multi$^2$, a hierarchical multi-agent decision-making framework that explicitly decomposes agent behavior into complementary roles. A high-level agent (System 1) focuses on context-aware sub-goal generation using supervised fine-tuning (SFT), while a low-level agent (System 2) executes atomic actions through offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) in interactive environments. This separation enables stable long-horizon control, mitigates objective drift, and allows efficient adaptation. Across diverse interactive environments, Multi$^2$ consistently outperforms strong agentic baselines, demonstrating improved robustness and coordination in multi-turn interaction. Beyond performance, we introduce and release three hierarchical benchmark datasets, filling a long-standing gap in training and evaluating hierarchical decision-making for LLM-based agents.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2606.03698 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.03698v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03698 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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