[agents] Rethinking Multi-Agent Systems in the Era of LLMs / Workshop / 16 Sept 2025 / University of Oxford
Michael Wooldridge
michael.john.wooldridge at gmail.com
Wed Jul 23 11:01:55 EDT 2025
Rethinking Multi-agent Systems in the Era of LLMs
A One-Day Workshop - University of Oxford, UK
* Call for Expressions of Interest *
16 September 2025
https://sites.google.com/view/rethinking-mas/home
OVERVIEW
The field of multi-agent systems emerged in the early 1990s, driven by
the vision that the future of AI would involve networks of AI programs
- agents - operating autonomously in pursuit of user-delegated
goals. A crucial part of this vision was that these agents would need
to interact with one-another in pursuit of their delegated goals,
which led to much work in the development of agents with social
skills: the ability to cooperate, coordinate, and negotiate.
The emergence of Large-Language Models (LLMs) has led to massive
renewed interest in multi-agent systems. Most LLMs are fundamentally
chatbots: they aren't equipped with the ability to carry out actions,
or to interact with other AI systems. There is much interest currently
in the possibility of LLM-powered agents, which leverage the general
intelligence of LLMs in systems that can act autonomously, exactly as
was envisaged in the original dream of multi-agent systems. In
addition, there is evidence that structuring a system as a collection
of interacting agents, each playing a specific role, can be a useful
way to build complex problem solving systems.
This workshop aims to bring together those interested in LLM-based
multi-agent systems. The goals of the event are, firstly, to try to
understand how the new technology of LLMs can be best used to realise
the classic vision of multi-agent systems, and second, what can be
learned from classic multi-agent systems in the LLM-agent era.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Include but are not restricted to...
Revisiting classic multi-agent architectures in light of LLM capabilities
Architectures for LLM agents
LLMs as agents vs. tools
Emergent behaviours in LLM-powered agent societies
Standards for LLM agents: MCP, A2A, ...
Communication and Coordination
Language as the primary protocol - agents communicating via
natural language vs. symbolic messages
Grounding meaning and shared understanding among LLM agents
Ontologies for LLM-powered agents
Negotiation, persuasion, and argumentation with LLM agents
Trust, deception, and misinformation in LLM-based agent societies
Emergence of shared mental models/collective intelligence
Dialogue protocols and structured conversations for LLM MAS
Learning and Adaptation
On-the-fly role learning and specialization among LLM agents
Multi-agent reinforcement learning with language-based policies
Meta-learning in agent collectives using LLMs
Evaluation and Benchmarking
Benchmarks for multi-agent communication involving LLMs
Token-efficient dialogues
Emergent cooperation / competition / collusion
Robustness and safety of LLM-powered agent collectives
Ethics, Safety, and Governance
Detecting and mitigating unintended/emergent behaviours
Alignment of multi-agent objectives when agents have LLM-driven autonomy
Social biases and value alignment in agent interactions
Regulatory and societal implications of scalable LLM-based agent swarms
Applications and Case Studies
Collaborative problem solving (e.g., scientific discovery, design)
Multi-agent simulations for economic or policy modeling
Large-scale digital societies and synthetic populations
Human-agent teams: hybrid collaboration settings
Multi-agent gaming and open-ended virtual worlds
Game theory and LLM-based multi-agent systems
Mechanism design for LLM-agent protocols
LLM agents as rational actors
Convergence to game theoretic solutions
Future Directions
Bridging symbolic and sub-symbolic reasoning in agent collectives
Designing societal-level intelligence: beyond individual agent optimization
LLM-based robotic AI
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
We are seeking expressions of interest for participation by giving a
talk or demo. Please submit your expression of interest via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=rethinkmas2025
Note we do *NOT* require original unpublished research, or indeed the
submission of technical papers. We are looking for expressions of
interest to present research or demos, and the submission process is
lightweight.
During the submission, you will be asked to upload a paper: you can
upload a paper (published or unpublished), report, presentation, or
any other document in the form of a PDF, to support your
application.
You should use the abstract to briefly describe what work you want to
present and how it relates to the theme of the event.
* DEADLINE FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST: FRIDAY 8 AUGUST 2025 AOE *
Expressions of interest will be only lightly reviewed, focussing on
relevance/interest. Detailed reviews will not be provided. A token fee
will be charged for attendance; consideration will be given for
participants unable to pay the fee.
WHEN AND WHERE
The workshop will be a 1-day event held on 16 Sept 2025 at:
Department of Computer Science
University of Oxford
Oxford
OX1 3QD
United Kingdom
ORGANISATION
* Michael Wooldridge [University of Oxford] mjw at cs.ox.ac.uk<mailto:mjw at cs.ox.ac.uk> *Main Contact*
* Sarit Kraus [Bar Ilan University, Israel]
* Emanuele la Malfa [University of Oxford]
* Samuele Marro [University of Oxford]
SUPPORT
This event is supported by the Schmidt Sciences Foundation under an
AI2020 Senior Fellowship awarded to Michael Wooldridge, and by the
UKRI under the AI Hub on Generative AI (https://www.genai.ac.uk).
--
Michael Wooldridge
Ashall Professor of the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, University of Oxford
PA: Jenny Dollard <jenny.dollard at cs.ox.ac.uk<mailto:jenny.dollard at cs.ox.ac.uk>>
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