The Deliberative Illusion: Diagnosing Factual Attrition and Stance Homogenization in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation
Multi-agent LLM systems often treat consensus as evidence of successful interaction. For deliberative problems, however, reliability depends on whether agents preserve the facts and viewpoints needed to interpret an issue. We identify the deliberative illusion: discussion produces (1) factual attrition, the progressive loss of issue-critical facts, alongside (2) stance homogenization, the collapse of diverse positions toward consensus. To measure this process, we introduce DelibTrace, a framework that decomposes each issue into atomic facts, labels issue-critical ones, distributes them across agents, and tracks their survival across discussion rounds. Across ethical and news-based deliber...
| Authors | Herun Wan, Jiaying Wu, Minnan Luo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
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