Learning Multi-Agent Orchestration:Higher-Order Interactions in Policy Improvement

Abstract

Learned orchestration has emerged as a promising paradigm for large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems, in which a central orchestrator selects agents and controls the information they receive throughout a task. Despite rapid empirical progress, existing methods train the orchestrator by crediting each decision with its own advantage, implicitly assuming that the other decisions in the episode stay fixed. This assumption fails in orchestration, where the contribution of each decision to the final outcome depends on the decisions preceding it, so the gain of a joint update is not the sum of its per-decision effects. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{IAPO}, an interaction-aware policy optimization framework that explicitly accounts for interactions among decisions. Specifically, IAPO exactly decomposes the performance difference between two policies into the effects of individual decisions and their interactions, which we prove can account for half of the attainable gain, and then optimizes both from sampled trajectories while certifying that every update is an improvement. On long-input versions of GSM8K, MATH, DROP, MBPP and HumanEval, against fifteen published multi-agent and workflow-search systems on the same 7B executor, IAPO's deployed plans reach the strongest system's accuracy with fewer tokens, and removing the interaction term costs 7 to 17 points of accuracy on code.