Arbiter Agent:持续监控多智能体对话以检测突现失调
阅读原文· arxiv.org提出 Arbiter Agent,在有限 inspection budget 下实时监控多智能体对话,逐步选择等待、质问参与者、检查系统提示或推理轨迹、记录可疑行为,最终报告失调源头。在五种对话条件(风险财务建议模型生物、评估感知、合谋智能体等)下测试五种工具配置和两种骨干模型。结果表明,Arbiter 可在对话结束前可靠检测失调智能体,主动检查工具同时提升检测准确率和速度;weight-induced 失调最难检测,instruction-induced 失调在被动观察下也能可靠识别;记录工具提升召回率但降低精确度。代码已开源。
As AI systems built from multiple language-model agents become more common, they are increasingly used to make decisions together: discussing, negotiating, and acting on shared tasks. While individual agents may appear well-aligned when tested on their own, problems can arise from how they interact with one another. We introduce the Arbiter, an agent designed to monitor multi-agent conversations in real time and identify which participants may be behaving in misaligned ways. The Arbiter operates under a limited "inspection budget", meaning it must decide carefully how to use its resources. As it observes a conversation step by step, it can choose to wait, question a participant, examine internal information such as system prompts or reasoning traces, or log concerning behavior. At the end, it produces a report identifying the likely source of misalignment. We evaluate the Arbiter across five conversation conditions, ranging from risky financial advice model organisms to evaluation-aware and colluding agents, we test five tool configurations of increasing capability and two backbone models. We find that the Arbiter reliably detects misaligned agents well before the end of the conversation, with active inspection tools improving both detection accuracy and speed. Weight-induced misalignment proves hardest to detect, while instruction-induced misalignment is identified reliably even under passive observation. The logging tool exhibits a dual effect, improving recall at the cost of precision. These results suggest that continual, budget-aware monitoring can effectively catch misalignment, and that overseeing multi-agent systems may require treating the auditor as an active participant in the process. The code is available at https://github.com/aisilab/arbiter.