DarkForest: Less Talk, Higher Accuracy for Multi-Agent LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Yi, Wei, Songtao, Jiang, Dongming, Guo, Zhichun, Li, Qiannan, Li, Bingzhe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914598001573888
author Li, Yi
Wei, Songtao
Jiang, Dongming
Guo, Zhichun
Li, Qiannan
Li, Bingzhe
author_facet Li, Yi
Wei, Songtao
Jiang, Dongming
Guo, Zhichun
Li, Qiannan
Li, Bingzhe
contents Multi-agent LLM systems improve reasoning by combining outputs from multiple agents, but interaction-heavy methods can introduce error propagation and high communication overhead. When agents exchange raw responses or reasoning traces, incorrect intermediate reasoning may be adopted and amplified, leading to confident but wrong consensus; multi-round communication also increases token consumption, latency, and inference cost. In this paper, we propose a controlled-communication coordination framework named DarkForest. DarkForest first keeps agents independent, so each agent produces an answer without seeing the others' outputs. It then parses the raw responses into structured candidate records, groups semantically equivalent candidates into clusters, and estimates a calibrated belief distribution over these clusters using agent reliability, confidence, parse quality, support-pattern reliability, and independence corrections. A coordinator receives only policy-permitted evidence from this belief state with controlled communication. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks show that DarkForest achieves leading overall quality, improves the strongest baseline by up to 30.7\% on benchmark metrics, and reduces token consumption by up to $6.5\times$ compared with communication-heavy baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_25188
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DarkForest: Less Talk, Higher Accuracy for Multi-Agent LLMs
Li, Yi
Wei, Songtao
Jiang, Dongming
Guo, Zhichun
Li, Qiannan
Li, Bingzhe
Artificial Intelligence
Multi-agent LLM systems improve reasoning by combining outputs from multiple agents, but interaction-heavy methods can introduce error propagation and high communication overhead. When agents exchange raw responses or reasoning traces, incorrect intermediate reasoning may be adopted and amplified, leading to confident but wrong consensus; multi-round communication also increases token consumption, latency, and inference cost. In this paper, we propose a controlled-communication coordination framework named DarkForest. DarkForest first keeps agents independent, so each agent produces an answer without seeing the others' outputs. It then parses the raw responses into structured candidate records, groups semantically equivalent candidates into clusters, and estimates a calibrated belief distribution over these clusters using agent reliability, confidence, parse quality, support-pattern reliability, and independence corrections. A coordinator receives only policy-permitted evidence from this belief state with controlled communication. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks show that DarkForest achieves leading overall quality, improves the strongest baseline by up to 30.7\% on benchmark metrics, and reduces token consumption by up to $6.5\times$ compared with communication-heavy baselines.
title DarkForest: Less Talk, Higher Accuracy for Multi-Agent LLMs
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25188