Where Reasoning Diverges: Localized Multi-Agent Debate for Multi-Hop Question Answering
Multi-agent debate commonly exchanges complete rationales even when disagreements concern only a few intermediate claims. We introduce Localized Multi-Agent Debate (LMAD), an inference-time protocol that represents agent rationales as nodes, locates their earliest conflict, and restricts debate to the corresponding local segments. Guarded resolution extends a shared committed state so that later conflicts can be addressed without reopening accepted steps. We evaluate LMAD on four multi-hop question-answering benchmarks using ten backbones from four model families. Our method achieves the highest macro-averaged judge accuracy across all ten backbones, outperforming the strongest convention...
| Authors | Weijun Gao, Xiang Ding, Haoyang Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 2 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.