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@g7xcy g7xcy commented Oct 31, 2023

Why are these changes needed?

Complex Group Chat may face the problem that Group Chat Manager cannot reasonably select the Next Speaker. At the same time, the order of agents in some automated processes is relatively fixed.

This PR adds agent_chat_chain: List[Agent] to the ConversableAgent class and enhances the run_chat method of the GroupChatManager class to ensure a fixed order of speakers in custom procedures.

Related issue number

"Close #485"

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@afourney
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afourney commented Oct 31, 2023

Thanks. This is indeed an issue that needs addressing. I had a quick look at the changes.

I have a couple of questions that you could perhaps answer before I start my review:

  1. Why add agent_chat_chain to ConversibleAgent if the behavior is chiefly something that only the GroupChatManager is concerned with?

  2. Given that the behavior / selection criteria is very different than the default GroupChatManager, why not create a new subclass -- perhaps AgentChainManager or RoundRobinChatManager or something to encapsulate this behavior? The GroupChatManager basically encodes a policy, or strategy, and I think we would invite other alternative strategies to be added in a similar way. Perhaps @gagb can chime in, since I believe he was involved in authoring the original manager.

@afourney afourney added the group chat/teams group-chat-related issues label Oct 31, 2023
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@gagb
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gagb commented Nov 1, 2023

Thanks. This is indeed an issue that needs addressing. I had a quick look at the changes.

I have a couple of questions that you could perhaps answer before I start my review:

  1. Why add agent_chat_chain to ConversibleAgent if the behavior is chiefly something that only the GroupChatManager is concerned with?
  2. Given that the behavior / selection criteria is very different than the default GroupChatManager, why not create a new subclass -- perhaps AgentChainManager or RoundRobinChatManager or something to encapsulate this behavior? The GroupChatManager basically encodes a policy, or strategy, and I think we would invite other alternative strategies to be added in a similar way. Perhaps @gagb can chime in, since I believe he was involved in authoring the original manager.

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@g7xcy
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g7xcy commented Nov 2, 2023

@afourney
Yeah, good questions.
Well, I think it's more natural to encapsulate this behavior in ConversibleAgent. I want to make a ConversibleAgent Object with agent_chat_chain a pipeline for a stable procedure.
But yes, it makes more sense to encapsulate this behavior in a class like AgentChainManager or ProcedureManager or some other thing and put it into a group chat.

@afourney
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afourney commented Nov 7, 2023

@g7xcy there is increasing interest on this issue. I think it would be great if you could revise this PR to subclass the GroupChat to ensure a fixed order.

I haven't delved too deeply into the code at this stage, but I think if you just assume a chat order that matches the order of agents provided in the GroupChat constructor, and override select_speaker to call next_agent, this should be enough. You could then pass an instance of this modified class to the GroupChatManager and get the behavior we want.

The CustomGroupChat class in this notebook is a good example: https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/blob/4e0a8972958a955acda65336494f9e02a2fb681f/notebook/agentchat_hierarchy_flow_using_select_speaker.ipynb

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afourney commented Dec 6, 2023

I believe this has been addressed via the new speaker_selection_method (round_robin).

@afourney afourney closed this Dec 6, 2023
jackgerrits pushed a commit that referenced this pull request Oct 2, 2024
* starting #520 - readme improvements

* more for #520

* tiny announcement

* cleanupheader

* simplifying

* move announcement to top

* rearrange logo

* we dont need the logo

* bumping the date

* added faq addressing #500
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Is there any way to fix a certain part of the chat order in the group chat?
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