Self-Improvement of Language Models by Post-Training on Multi-Agent Debate

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Samanta, Ankur, Magesh, Akshayaa, Wu, Runzhe, Jain, Ayush, Yu, Youliang, Jiang, Daniel, Vidolov, Boris, Sajda, Paul, Efroni, Yonathan, Hassani, Kaveh
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Samanta, Ankur
Magesh, Akshayaa
Wu, Runzhe
Jain, Ayush
Yu, Youliang
Jiang, Daniel
Vidolov, Boris
Sajda, Paul
Efroni, Yonathan
Hassani, Kaveh
author_facet Samanta, Ankur
Magesh, Akshayaa
Wu, Runzhe
Jain, Ayush
Yu, Youliang
Jiang, Daniel
Vidolov, Boris
Sajda, Paul
Efroni, Yonathan
Hassani, Kaveh
contents Self-improvement, where models improve beyond their current performance without external supervision, remains a challenge. The core difficulty is sourcing a training signal stronger than what the model itself can currently produce. Majority voting has been shown to provide such a signal by aggregating over multiple samples, helping mitigate some of the inconsistencies in LM reasoning. In this work, we show that multi-agent debate--where models collaborate and exchange reasoning over multiple rounds--provides an even richer signal than single-round majority voting. We introduce Multi-Agent Consensus Alignment (MACA), which uses reinforcement learning (RL) to post-train models to effectively utilize multi-agent debate. We find that preference learning over full reasoning traces, learning to differentiate between majority and minority reasoning, is more effective than binary consensus rewards or SFT-based approaches for leveraging these debate signals. This produces three key improvements: models are (1) better at utilizing the multi-agent debate setting (+26.87% on MATH), (2) individually more accurate (+21.51% on MathQA), and (3) more self-consistent (+27.6% on GSM8K). We also see strong generalization to unseen benchmarks (+16.3% on GPQA, +11.6% on CommonsenseQA).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15172
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Improvement of Language Models by Post-Training on Multi-Agent Debate
Samanta, Ankur
Magesh, Akshayaa
Wu, Runzhe
Jain, Ayush
Yu, Youliang
Jiang, Daniel
Vidolov, Boris
Sajda, Paul
Efroni, Yonathan
Hassani, Kaveh
Artificial Intelligence
Self-improvement, where models improve beyond their current performance without external supervision, remains a challenge. The core difficulty is sourcing a training signal stronger than what the model itself can currently produce. Majority voting has been shown to provide such a signal by aggregating over multiple samples, helping mitigate some of the inconsistencies in LM reasoning. In this work, we show that multi-agent debate--where models collaborate and exchange reasoning over multiple rounds--provides an even richer signal than single-round majority voting. We introduce Multi-Agent Consensus Alignment (MACA), which uses reinforcement learning (RL) to post-train models to effectively utilize multi-agent debate. We find that preference learning over full reasoning traces, learning to differentiate between majority and minority reasoning, is more effective than binary consensus rewards or SFT-based approaches for leveraging these debate signals. This produces three key improvements: models are (1) better at utilizing the multi-agent debate setting (+26.87% on MATH), (2) individually more accurate (+21.51% on MathQA), and (3) more self-consistent (+27.6% on GSM8K). We also see strong generalization to unseen benchmarks (+16.3% on GPQA, +11.6% on CommonsenseQA).
title Self-Improvement of Language Models by Post-Training on Multi-Agent Debate
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15172