Smurfs: Multi-Agent System using Context-Efficient DFSDT for Tool Planning

Junzhi Chen, Juhao Liang, Benyou Wang


Abstract
Teaching large language models (LLMs) to use tools for solving complex problems can grant them human-like reasoning abilities. ReAct and its variants are popular frameworks for tool use in both single-agent and multi-agent systems. To address issues like error propagation and limited exploration in ReAct, the Deep First Search Decision Tree (DFSDT) was proposed, but it faces challenges such as rollback instability, redundant context, and premature termination in single-agent settings. We introduce “Smurfs,” a novel multi-agent system (MAS) that enhances DFSDT with a modular, context-efficient, and training-free design. Smurfs surpasses baseline methods in both the open-ended StableToolBench and the closed-ended HotpotQA tasks, reducing token usage by 60.9% compared to DFSDT and enabling Mistral-7b to perform on par with GPT-4-DFSDT. Extensive ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of Smurfs’ core components, offering valuable insights for the construction and interpretation of MAS, and paving the way for future exploration. We release the code at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Smurfs.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.169
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3281–3298
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.169/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junzhi Chen, Juhao Liang, and Benyou Wang. 2025. Smurfs: Multi-Agent System using Context-Efficient DFSDT for Tool Planning. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3281–3298, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Smurfs: Multi-Agent System using Context-Efficient DFSDT for Tool Planning (Chen et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.169.pdf