Multi-agent systems manage changing tasks with issue tracking
RepoMAS: Solving Progressively Specified Tasks with Issue-Driven Multi-Agent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
Tasks often change or get clearer while people are still working on them, but many computer systems expect all task details beforehand. The authors studied tasks that are only partly known at the start and become clearer during work. They created a new test that checks if a system can handle these changing needs well. Their system, RepoMAS, keeps track of new problems and changing requirements like a project manager would, updating its plan as it works. This approach performed better than others on several tests, showing that computer agents benefit from tracking and revising their understanding of tasks as they go.
What this means in practice
- •For software development teams: Manage and adapt project requirements dynamically during development to better handle emerging issues and changing needs.
- •For customer support automation teams: Improve automated handling of customer requests that evolve or gain details during interaction by updating task goals on the fly.
Authors
Yuchen Song, Andong Chen, Wenxin Zhu, Muyun Yang, Tiejun Zhao
Abstract
LLM-based multi-agent systems (MASs) have shown strong potential for solving complex tasks, but most assume that task requirements are sufficiently specified before execution. In practice, user requests are often incomplete, and additional requirements may only become clear during reasoning, tool use, or execution. We refer to such problems as progressively specified tasks. To systematically study this setting, we introduce ProgSpec, a benchmark that evaluates final outputs against requirements explicitly stated in the initial request and additional requirements supported by the available task evidence. We further propose RepoMAS, an issue-driven multi-agent framework inspired by open-source project management. RepoMAS records newly discovered requirements, conflicts, and failures as structured Issues and uses them to revise the task specification and execution structure during problem solving. Across ProgSpec and five existing benchmarks, RepoMAS achieves the best performance. Further analyses show that its issue-driven revision and repository maintenance mechanisms consistently contribute to performance. These results highlight the importance of allowing MASs to revise not only how a task is solved, but also revise their explicit representation of task requirements during execution.