Statistical Scouting Finds Debate-Safe but Not Debate-Useful Cases: A Matched-Ceiling Study of Open-Weight LLM Reasoning Protocols
When should a language model answer directly, sample and vote, or engage in multi-agent debate? Recent work shows voting often explains much of the gain attributed to debate, while selective-debate systems activate deliberation only on uncertain examples. We ask: under a matched ceiling on generated tokens (960 per example), how much per-example routing headroom exists, and how much is recoverable from cheap pre-deliberation signals? We evaluate greedy decoding, three-sample voting, and a two-agent critique-revise debate on MuSiQue and GSM8K using Llama 3.1 8B Instruct and Ministral 3 8B Instruct. On MuSiQue, an oracle selecting the correct protocol per example gains +14.0 and +13.7 pp ov...
| Authors | Julia Hu, Alfred Shen, Kumar Lakshmipathi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 May 2026 |
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