ALIGN: Aligned Delegation with Performance Guarantees for Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00127v1
• Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:29:21 GMT
• Title: ALIGN: Aligned Delegation with Performance Guarantees for Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning
• Authors: Tong Zhu, Baiting Chen, Jin Zhou, Hua Zhou, Sriram Sankararaman, Xiaowu Dai,
• Abstract summary: Inference-time ensemble methods can improve performance by sampling diverse reasoning paths or aggregating multiple candidate answers.<n>We propose a novel method, Aligned Delegation for Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning (ALIGN), which formulates LLM reasoning as an aligned delegation game.<n>We establish theoretical guarantees showing that, under a fair comparison with equal access to candidate solutions, ALIGN provably improves expected performance over single-agent generation.
• Score: 9.381086885165208
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: LLMs often underperform on complex reasoning tasks when relying on a single generation-and-selection pipeline. Inference-time ensemble methods can improve performance by sampling diverse reasoning paths or aggregating multiple candidate answers, but they typically treat candidates independently and provide no formal guarantees that ensembling improves reasoning quality. We propose a novel method, Aligned Delegation for Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning (ALIGN), which formulates LLM reasoning as an aligned delegation game. In ALIGN, a principal delegates a task to multiple agents that generate candidate solutions under designed incentives, and then selects among their outputs to produce a final answer. This formulation induces structured interaction among agents while preserving alignment between agent and principal objectives. We establish theoretical guarantees showing that, under a fair comparison with equal access to candidate solutions, ALIGN provably improves expected performance over single-agent generation. Our analysis accommodates correlated candidate answers and relaxes independence assumptions that are commonly used in prior work. Empirical results across a broad range of LLM reasoning benchmarks consistently demonstrate that ALIGN outperforms strong single-agent and ensemble baselines.

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