The Cost of Consensus: Isolated Self-Correction Prevails Over Unguided Homogeneous Multi-Agent Debate
Multi-agent debate, where teams of LLMs iteratively exchange rationales and vote on answers, is widely deployed under the assumption that peer review filters hallucinations. Yet the failure dynamics of homogeneous debate remain poorly understood, therefore we report findings from a controlled empirical study of teams of $N{=}10$ homogeneous agents (Qwen2.5-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, Ministral-3-8B) across $R{=}3$ debate rounds on two high-difficulty benchmarks (GSM-Hard and MMLU-Hard). We compare peer debate against isolated self-correction and a stochastic noise control that injects rationales from unrelated problems. We decompose debate failure into three model-dependent pathways: sycophantic co...
| Authors | Blaž Bertalanič, Carolina Fortuna |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 29 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 April 2026 |
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