The Reasoning Trap: An Information-Theoretic Bound on Closed-System Multi-Step LLM Reasoning
When copies of the same language model are prompted to debate, they produce diverse phrasings of one perspective rather than diverse perspectives. Multi-agent debate (MAD), and more broadly closed-system reasoning where agents iteratively transform each other's outputs, tends to preserve answer accuracy while degrading the reasoning behind those answers. We name the multi-agent case the Debate Trap and the broader phenomenon the Reasoning Trap, offering a programmatic theory of evidence-grounded reasoning failure.The framework has three parts: (i) SFS (Supported Faithfulness Score), a claim-level metric verifying decomposed atomic claims against provided evidence (decomposer-invariant ran...
| Authors | Kwan Soo Shin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 May 2026 |
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