Silence is Not Consensus: Disrupting Agreement Bias in Multi-Agent LLMs via Catfish Agent for Clinical Decision Making

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21503v1
• Date: Tue, 27 May 2025 17:59:50 GMT
• Title: Silence is Not Consensus: Disrupting Agreement Bias in Multi-Agent LLMs via Catfish Agent for Clinical Decision Making
• Authors: Yihan Wang, Qiao Yan, Zhenghao Xing, Lihao Liu, Junjun He, Chi-Wing Fu, Xiaowei Hu, Pheng-Ann Heng,
• Abstract summary: We present a new concept called Catfish Agent, a role-specialized LLM designed to inject structured dissent and counter silent agreement.<n>Inspired by the catfish effect'' in organizational psychology, the Catfish Agent is designed to challenge emerging consensus to stimulate deeper reasoning.
• Score: 80.94208848596215
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in clinical question answering, with recent multi-agent frameworks further improving diagnostic accuracy via collaborative reasoning. However, we identify a recurring issue of Silent Agreement, where agents prematurely converge on diagnoses without sufficient critical analysis, particularly in complex or ambiguous cases. We present a new concept called Catfish Agent, a role-specialized LLM designed to inject structured dissent and counter silent agreement. Inspired by the ``catfish effect'' in organizational psychology, the Catfish Agent is designed to challenge emerging consensus to stimulate deeper reasoning. We formulate two mechanisms to encourage effective and context-aware interventions: (i) a complexity-aware intervention that modulates agent engagement based on case difficulty, and (ii) a tone-calibrated intervention articulated to balance critique and collaboration. Evaluations on nine medical Q&A and three medical VQA benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms both single- and multi-agent LLMs frameworks, including leading commercial models such as GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1.

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