MAFA: A multi-agent framework for annotation

TL;DR

This paper presents MAFA, a multi-agent framework for FAQ annotation in banking applications that combines multiple specialized agents and a judge to improve accuracy and handling of ambiguous queries.

Contribution

Introduces a novel multi-agent ensemble framework with structured reasoning and few-shot strategies for improved FAQ annotation in banking and benchmark datasets.

Findings

14% increase in Top-1 accuracy on real-world dataset

18% increase in Top-5 accuracy on real-world dataset

12% improvement in Mean Reciprocal Rank

Abstract

Modern consumer banking applications require accurate and efficient retrieval of information in response to user queries. Mapping user utterances to the most relevant Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is a crucial component of these systems. Traditional approaches often rely on a single model or technique, which may not capture the nuances of diverse user inquiries. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent framework for FAQ annotation that combines multiple specialized agents with different approaches and a judge agent that reranks candidates to produce optimal results. Our agents utilize a structured reasoning approach inspired by Attentive Reasoning Queries (ARQs), which guides them through systematic reasoning steps using targeted, task-specific JSON queries. Our framework features a few-shot example strategy, where each agent receives different few-shots, enhancing ensemble diversity and coverage of the query space. We evaluate our framework on a real-world major bank dataset as well as public benchmark datasets (LCQMC and FiQA), demonstrating significant improvements over single-agent approaches across multiple metrics, including a 14% increase in Top-1 accuracy, an 18% increase in Top-5 accuracy, and a 12% improvement in Mean Reciprocal Rank on our dataset, and similar gains on public benchmarks when compared with traditional and single-agent annotation techniques. Our framework is particularly effective at handling ambiguous queries, making it well-suited for deployment in production banking applications while showing strong generalization capabilities across different domains and languages.