MASTER: A Multi-Agent System with LLM Specialized MCTS
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly being explored for problem-solving tasks. However, their strategic planning capability is often viewed with skepticism. Recent studies have incorporated the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to augment the planning capacity of LLM. Despite its potential, MCTS relies on extensive sampling simulations to approximate the true reward distribution, which leads to two primary issues. Firstly, MCTS is effective for tasks like the Game of Go, where simulation results can yield objective rewards (e.g., 1 for a win and 0 for a loss). However, for tasks such as question answering, the result of a simulation is the answer to the question, which cannot yield an objective reward without the ground truth. Secondly, obtaining statistically significant reward estimations typically requires a sample size exceeding 30 simulations, resulting in excessive token usage and time consumption. To address these challenges, we present the Multi-Agent System with Tactical Execution and Reasoning using LLM Specialized MCTS (MASTER), a novel framework that coordinates agent recruitment and communication through LLM specialized MCTS. This system autonomously adjusts the number of agents based on task complexity and ensures focused communication among them. Comprehensive experiments across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. It achieves 76% accuracy on HotpotQA and 80% on WebShop, setting new state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.
Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2025.
Builds on
23 of 37 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
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Other references · 19
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,323
- 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
- 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,509
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,906
- 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,197
- 2023Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debugcited by 963
- 2023Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Modelcited by 846
- 2022PlanBench: An Extensible Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Planning and Reasoning about Changecited by 372
- 2023PromptAgent: Strategic Planning with Language Models Enables Expert-level Prompt Optimizationcited by 226
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- 2023Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Futurecited by 184
- 2024Meta-Prompting: Enhancing Language Models with Task-Agnostic Scaffoldingcited by 115
- 2023Skeleton-of-Thought: Prompting LLMs for Efficient Parallel Generationcited by 103
- 2023Phenomenal Yet Puzzling: Testing Inductive Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models with Hypothesis Refinementcited by 89
- 2023ReLLa: Retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendationcited by 76
- 2023End-to-End Beam Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answeringcited by 35
- 2021Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits with Control Variatescited by 7
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 7; 2026: 8.
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