CEPO: A General Framework for Improving Prompt Optimization in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) require both effective coordination and specialized task execution. Existing prompt optimization approaches typically couple these functions within agent-specific prompts. We introduce Coordinator-Executor Prompt Optimization (CEPO), a general framework for improving prompt optimization in MAS. CEPO separates system-level coordination from agent-level execution through a shared coordinator prompt and agent-specific executor prompts, and guides their updates according to their respective roles. This structure allows shared coordination rules to be refined consistently across agents while keeping execution instructions separately adjustable. CEPO provides the prompt structure and optimization guidance, while existing prompt optimizers perform the underlying search. Extensive experiments spanning 11 benchmarks across four domains demonstrate that applying CEPO to four existing prompt optimizers consistently improves their performance. Ablations and qualitative analyses support the proposed design, while controlled studies on a document-understanding MAS further demonstrate improved optimization budget efficiency and performance scaling with the number of agents.