AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering
Taolin Zhang, Dongyang Li Shanghai University of Electric Power, Chen Chen, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan Hefei University of Technology, Xiaofeng He East China Normal University, Chengyu Wang Independent Researcher and Alibaba Group, Richang Hong Hefei University of Technology
原文摘要
Despite substantial advances in large language models (LLMs), producing factually consistent responses for knowledge-intensive question answering remains challenging. These difficulties are primarily due to hallucination and the limitations of LLMs in bridging long-tail knowledge gaps. To address this, we propose AMATA, an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that dynamically integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. Our architecture leverages six specialized agents that collaboratively perform structured actions for complex question reasoning. We formalize multi-agent collaboration with external tools as a trajectory preference alignment problem, incorporating question-aware agent customization and inter-agent preference harmonization. AMATA introduces two principal innovations: (1) Intra-Trajectory Preference Learning, which learns objective-oriented preferences to prioritize critical agents, and (2) Inter-Agent Dependency Learning, which captures cross-agent tool dependencies through a novel dependency-aware direct preference optimization technique. Empirical results show that AMATA consistently outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. Further analysis demonstrates the efficiency of our method in reducing token consumption.
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