Autonomous Topology Mutation: Safe Runtime Restructuring for Multi-Agent LLM Systems with Capability, State, and Shadow Invariants
Bronislav Sidik, Chaya Levi, and Nizzan Kimhi of the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology present Autonomous Topology Mutation (ATM), a runtime mechanism for restructuring multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems. The core contribution is a safe, automated method to dynamically alter the internal architecture of these systems when individual agents experience performance degradation or overload, addressing a critical limitation of existing frameworks that fix topology at boot time. This work is crucial for building more robust, scalable, and adaptable LLM-powered applications, particularly those with complex workflows or unpredictable task demands. The intended audience includes software engineers and researchers working on multi-agent LLM systems, distributed AI, and runtime adaptation, who will benefit from systems that can self-optimize under stress.
Two paramount technical ideas underpin ATM. First, a telemetry-driven Bottleneck Index, comprising six signals like queue depth, context thrash, and tool error rates, serves as the detection mechanism for agent overload. This index is calibrated against system warmup to avoid false positives. Second, three safety invariants—capability monotonicity, state-routing completeness, and shadow-before-live validation—ensure that any structural change is performed without compromising system integrity or data privacy. Capability monotonicity ensures that specialized sub-agents collectively retain or expand the parent agent's capabilities. State-routing completeness mandates that all necessary state is transferred correctly, with privacy-level-aware routing preventing unauthorized data exposure. Shadow-before-live validation involves testing the new topology in a simulated environment before routing live traffic, preventing unforeseen disruptions. The research demonstrates significant improvements in task success rates, from 3.3% to 61.7% in specific scenarios, and dramatically reduces high-privacy memory exposure. The overhead introduced by ATM's invariants is minimal, less than 500 microseconds at the 99th percentile on the agent hot path.
This work enables the development of LLM systems that can dynamically adapt to varying workloads and agent performance, fostering greater resilience and efficiency. Going forward, ATM could influence the design of future multi-agent LLM frameworks, promoting a shift towards more emergent and self-optimizing architectures. The publication is on arXiv, under cs.AI. This analysis is based on the provided abstract as a full paper was not available.