When AI Agents Disagree Like Humans: Reasoning Trace Analysis for Human-AI Collaborative Moderation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wawer, Michał, Chudziak, Jarosław A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wawer, Michał
Chudziak, Jarosław A.
author_facet Wawer, Michał
Chudziak, Jarosław A.
contents When LLM-based multi-agent systems disagree, current practice treats this as noise to be resolved through consensus. We propose it can be signal. We focus on hate speech moderation, a domain where judgments depend on cultural context and individual value weightings, producing high legitimate disagreement among human annotators. We hypothesize that convergent disagreement, where agents reason similarly but conclude differently, indicates genuine value pluralism that humans also struggle to resolve. Using the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, we embed reasoning traces from five perspective-differentiated agents and classify disagreement patterns using a four-category taxonomy based on reasoning similarity and conclusion agreement. We find that raw reasoning divergence weakly predicts human annotator conflict, but the structure of agent discord carries additional signal: cases where agents agree on a verdict show markedly lower human disagreement than cases where they do not, with large effect sizes (d>0.8) surviving correction for multiple comparisons. Our taxonomy-based ordering correlates with human disagreement patterns. These preliminary findings motivate a shift from consensus-seeking to uncertainty-surfacing multi-agent design, where disagreement structure - not magnitude - guides when human judgment is needed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03796
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When AI Agents Disagree Like Humans: Reasoning Trace Analysis for Human-AI Collaborative Moderation
Wawer, Michał
Chudziak, Jarosław A.
Multiagent Systems
When LLM-based multi-agent systems disagree, current practice treats this as noise to be resolved through consensus. We propose it can be signal. We focus on hate speech moderation, a domain where judgments depend on cultural context and individual value weightings, producing high legitimate disagreement among human annotators. We hypothesize that convergent disagreement, where agents reason similarly but conclude differently, indicates genuine value pluralism that humans also struggle to resolve. Using the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, we embed reasoning traces from five perspective-differentiated agents and classify disagreement patterns using a four-category taxonomy based on reasoning similarity and conclusion agreement. We find that raw reasoning divergence weakly predicts human annotator conflict, but the structure of agent discord carries additional signal: cases where agents agree on a verdict show markedly lower human disagreement than cases where they do not, with large effect sizes (d>0.8) surviving correction for multiple comparisons. Our taxonomy-based ordering correlates with human disagreement patterns. These preliminary findings motivate a shift from consensus-seeking to uncertainty-surfacing multi-agent design, where disagreement structure - not magnitude - guides when human judgment is needed.
title When AI Agents Disagree Like Humans: Reasoning Trace Analysis for Human-AI Collaborative Moderation
topic Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03796