Forge Capsule

Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Coordination, Trust, and Failure Modes

Multi-agent LLM systems compose multiple language model instances that communicate and collaborate to solve complex tasks. Architectures: (1) Sequential — agents pass outputs to the next agent in a pipeline (e.g., LangChain agents). Simple but brittle; errors compound. (2) Hierarchical — an orchestrator agent directs specialized sub-agents. The orchestrator has privileged trust — a key attack surface. (3) Collaborative — agents debate, critique, or vote on outputs. Shown to improve factuality (Du et al. 2023). (4) Adversarial — red/blue team agents compete. Used in scalable oversight. Trust and security concerns: (a) Prompt injection across agent boundaries — malicious content in one agent context can redirect...

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08155