AgentSlimming: Towards Efficient and Cost-Aware Multi-Agent Systems
Yulang Chen, Haoxuan Peng, Jinyan Liu, Zichen Wen Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongrui Liu Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Linfeng Zhang Shanghai Jiaotong University
原文摘要
Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks. However, manually designing optimal communication topologies is labor-intensive, while automated expansion methods often result in bloated structures with redundant agents, leading to excessive token consumption. To address this problem, we introduce AgentSlimming, a plug-and-play compression framework for graph-structured multi-agent workflows. Motivated by the AgentPruner and AgentQuant in neural networks, AgentSlimming compresses workflows by firstly estimate the importance score of each agent with a hybrid mechanism, and then removing redundant agents or replacing them with low-cost ones, where each operation is then validated with a baseline-anchored acceptance rule to prevent performance collapse. Experiments show that AgentSlimming reduces average token cost by up to 78.9% with negligible performance degradation, and even sometimes improves accuracy, achieving a strong Pareto-optimal trade-off between cost and quality.
cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表