RoundTable: Investigating Group Decision-Making Mechanism in Multi-Agent Collaboration

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07161v2
• Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2025 22:35:00 GMT
• Title: RoundTable: Investigating Group Decision-Making Mechanism in Multi-Agent Collaboration
• Authors: Young-Min Cho, Raphael Shu, Nilaksh Das, Tamer Alkhouli, Yi-An Lai, Jason Cai, Monica Sunkara, Yi Zhang, Dan Roth,
• Abstract summary: We analyze how different voting rules affect decision quality and efficiency in a multi-round collaboration.<n>At the extreme, unanimous voting gives 87% lower initial performance than the best-performing method.<n>Our findings highlight the crucial role of group decision-making in optimizing MAS collaboration.
• Score: 49.4875652673051
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Effective group decision-making is critical in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Yet, how different mechanisms for reaching consensus impact collaboration quality and efficiency remains understudied. We conduct a systematic study on group decision-making mechanisms in a decentralized setting. Through controlled experiments, we analyze how different voting rules affect decision quality and efficiency in a multi-round collaboration. Results reveal that majority voting often cause inefficient collaboration due to its strict acceptance criteria. At the extreme, unanimous voting gives 87% lower initial performance than the best-performing method. Our qualitative analysis of cross-agent communication shows that messages become longer and more repetitive over time: while message length increases by 84%, similarity to the previous round increases to 90%. Based on these insights, language-based early stopping methods make the performance 13% closer to oracle while reducing rounds by 50%. Our findings highlight the crucial role of group decision-making in optimizing MAS collaboration.

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