Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debate

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kaesberg, Lars Benedikt, Becker, Jonas, Wahle, Jan Philip, Ruas, Terry, Gipp, Bela
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kaesberg, Lars Benedikt
Becker, Jonas
Wahle, Jan Philip
Ruas, Terry
Gipp, Bela
author_facet Kaesberg, Lars Benedikt
Becker, Jonas
Wahle, Jan Philip
Ruas, Terry
Gipp, Bela
contents Much of the success of multi-agent debates depends on carefully choosing the right parameters. The decision-making protocol stands out as it can highly impact final model answers, depending on how decisions are reached. Systematic comparison of decision protocols is difficult because many studies alter multiple discussion parameters beyond the protocol. So far, it has been largely unknown how decision-making influences different tasks. This work systematically evaluates the impact of seven decision protocols (e.g., majority voting, unanimity consensus). We change only one variable at a time - the decision protocol - to analyze how different methods affect the collaboration between agents and measure differences in knowledge and reasoning tasks. Our results show that voting protocols improve performance by 13.2% in reasoning tasks and consensus protocols by 2.8% in knowledge tasks compared to other decision protocols. Increasing the number of agents improves performance, while more discussion rounds before voting reduce it. To improve decision-making by increasing answer diversity, we propose two new methods, All-Agents Drafting (AAD) and Collective Improvement (CI). Our methods improve task performance by up to 3.3% with AAD and up to 7.4% with CI. This work demonstrates the importance of decision-making in multi-agent debates beyond scaling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19130
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debate
Kaesberg, Lars Benedikt
Becker, Jonas
Wahle, Jan Philip
Ruas, Terry
Gipp, Bela
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Much of the success of multi-agent debates depends on carefully choosing the right parameters. The decision-making protocol stands out as it can highly impact final model answers, depending on how decisions are reached. Systematic comparison of decision protocols is difficult because many studies alter multiple discussion parameters beyond the protocol. So far, it has been largely unknown how decision-making influences different tasks. This work systematically evaluates the impact of seven decision protocols (e.g., majority voting, unanimity consensus). We change only one variable at a time - the decision protocol - to analyze how different methods affect the collaboration between agents and measure differences in knowledge and reasoning tasks. Our results show that voting protocols improve performance by 13.2% in reasoning tasks and consensus protocols by 2.8% in knowledge tasks compared to other decision protocols. Increasing the number of agents improves performance, while more discussion rounds before voting reduce it. To improve decision-making by increasing answer diversity, we propose two new methods, All-Agents Drafting (AAD) and Collective Improvement (CI). Our methods improve task performance by up to 3.3% with AAD and up to 7.4% with CI. This work demonstrates the importance of decision-making in multi-agent debates beyond scaling.
title Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debate
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19130