ConvoMap: Interactive Visualizations for Exploring Complex Conversations in Multi-Agent Systems

Ashley Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Gromit Chan, Shunan Guo, Eunyee Koh, Steve Oney, and Jane Hoffswell

Following the rapid emergence of large language models, Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) became a promising approach for accomplishing complex tasks. In MASs, multiple autonomous agents with predetermined roles collaborate by dividing responsibilities. However, MAS developers often struggle to understand and diagnose agents' behavior from thousands of inter-agent messages across multiple complex conversations. To identify key requirements and challenges related to evaluating, debugging, and managing MASs, we conducted a formative study with six MAS developers. We then introduce ConvoMap, a prototype that addresses a key challenge of MAS development---understanding agents' behaviors across multiple conversations. ConvoMap integrates automated qualitative coding to enable multi-level inspection of agents' behavior. ConvoMap can then visualize hundreds of MAS conversations by representing messages as points on a 2D map that encode their semantic meanings and interactions between agents. To better support navigation and deeper analysis, ConvoMap provides topic overviews and highlights relevant text segments. A comparison study showed that ConvoMap helped to understand agents' behavior more accurately than the baseline.