Chen Chen
Other people with similar names: Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Chen Chen, Chen Chen
Unverified author pages with similar names: Chen Chen
2026
AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Chen Chen | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Chen Chen | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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.
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution
Taolin Zhang | Pukun Zhao | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Chen Chen | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taolin Zhang | Pukun Zhao | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Chen Chen | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable collaborative capabilities across complex tasks. To enhance the overall efficiency, existing methods often rely on aggressive graph topology evolution for agents (e.g., node or edge pruning), which risks prematurely discarding valuable agents due to transient issues such as hallucinations or temporary knowledge gaps. However, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for "zombie" agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. In this paper, we propose AgentRevive, a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution. Our approach dynamically manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions, implemented via two key components: (1) State-Aware Policy Learning: Agent states are divided into "Active", "Standby", and "Terminated", selectively propagating messages based on agent memory. The policy employs a risk estimator to optimize agent state transitions by assessing hallucination risk, minimizing the influence of unreliable nodes while safeguarding valuable ones. (2) State-Aware Edge Optimization: Subgraph edges are pruned according to states learned from the policy, permanently removing "Terminated" nodes and retaining "Standby" nodes for subsequent rounds to observe potential future contributions. Extensive experiments on general reasoning, domain-specific, and hallucination challenge tasks show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling.