Remember and Reweight: Enhancing Multi-Agent Debate with Experience Memory and Confidence Estimation
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03619v1
- Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:05:01 GMT
- Title: Remember and Reweight: Enhancing Multi-Agent Debate with Experience Memory and Confidence Estimation
- Abstract summary: Multi-agent debate (MAD) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models by having multiple agents iteratively refine their responses through discussion.<n>MAD suffers from a critical vulnerability known as shared misconception: when a majority of agents converge on an incorrect answer, the debate process tends to amplify rather than correct the error.<n>Existing methods primarily address peer skew but leave the agents' inherently biased concept priors unaddressed.<n>We propose R$2$-MAD, a framework that equips agents with an experience memory accumulated from past debates.
- Score: 6.5331167606521205
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models by having multiple agents iteratively refine their responses through discussion. However, MAD suffers from a critical vulnerability known as shared misconception: when a majority of agents initially converge on an incorrect answer, the debate process tends to amplify rather than correct the error. Existing methods primarily address peer skew but leave the agents' inherently biased concept priors unaddressed. To mitigate this systematic weakness, we propose R$^2$-MAD (Remember and Reweight for Multi-Agent Debate), a framework that equips agents with an experience memory accumulated from past debates. R$^2$-MAD intervenes on both failure modes through two complementary mechanisms: A debate-state-aware retrieval policy dynamically calibrates the concept prior by retrieving relevant historical evidence based on the current consensus level. Then these retrieved experiences provide a basis for estimating per-agent reliability, yielding confidence weights to modulate peer influence. Experiments on various benchmarks show that R$^2$-MAD achieves consistent improvements over existing single-agent and MAD baselines.
Related papers
- Heterogeneous Consensus-Progressive Reasoning for Efficient Multi-Agent Debate [58.675713546748305]
Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) is a collaborative framework in which multiple agents iteratively refine solutions through the generation of reasoning and alternating critique cycles.<n>This work introduces Heterogeneous Consensus-Progressive Reasoning for Efficient Multi-Agent Debate (HCP-MAD)<n>HCP-MAD employs a three-stage progressive reasoning mechanism to develop adaptive solutions across varying task complexities.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-04-03T06:58:59Z) - Prepare Reasoning Language Models for Multi-Agent Debate with Self-Debate Reinforcement Learning [49.99694105650486]
Self-Debate Reinforcement Learning (SDRL) is a training framework that equips a single large language model with strong problem-solving ability.<n>We show that SDRL improves overall Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) performance while simultaneously strengthening single model reasoning.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-01-29T20:21:44Z) - DynaDebate: Breaking Homogeneity in Multi-Agent Debate with Dynamic Path Generation [47.62978918069135]
We introduce Dynamic Multi-Agent Debate (DynaDebate), which enhances the effectiveness of multi-agent debate through three key mechanisms.<n>Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynaDebate achieves superior performance across various benchmarks, surpassing existing state-of-the-art MAD methods.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-01-09T12:01:33Z) - Demystifying Multi-Agent Debate: The Role of Confidence and Diversity [31.236476720977294]
Multi-agent debate (MAD) is widely used to improve large language model (LLM) performance through test-time scaling.<n>Recent work shows that vanilla MAD often underperforms simple majority vote despite higher computational cost.<n>We identify two key mechanisms missing from vanilla MAD: (i) diversity of initial viewpoints and (ii) explicit, calibrated confidence communication.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-01-09T02:38:30Z) - Towards Scalable Oversight with Collaborative Multi-Agent Debate in Error Detection [81.52796950244705]
Self-diagnosis is unreliable on complex tasks unless aided by reliable external feedback.<n>We introduce a new collaborative MAD protocol, termed ColMAD, that reframes MAD as a non-zero sum game.<n>We show that ColMAD significantly outperforms previous competitive MAD by 19%.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-23T19:46:00Z) - MADIAVE: Multi-Agent Debate for Implicit Attribute Value Extraction [52.89860691282002]
Implicit Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) is essential for accurately representing products in e-commerce.<n>Despite advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), implicit AVE remains challenging due to the complexity of multidimensional data.<n>We introduce textscmodelname, a multi-agent debate framework that employs multiple MLLM agents to iteratively refine inferences.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-07T06:27:42Z) - Free-MAD: Consensus-Free Multi-Agent Debate [17.384699873512464]
Multi-agent debate (MAD) is an emerging approach to improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs)<n>Existing MAD methods rely on multiple rounds of interaction among agents to reach consensus, and the final output is selected by majority voting in the last round.<n>We propose textscFree-MAD, a novel MAD framework that eliminates the need for consensus among agents.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-09-14T01:55:01Z) - Debate or Vote: Which Yields Better Decisions in Multi-Agent Large Language Models? [13.569822165805851]
Multi-Agent Debate(MAD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the performance of large language models.<n>Despite recent advances, the key factors driving MAD's effectiveness remain unclear.<n>We disentangle MAD into two key components--Majority Voting and inter-agent Debate--and assess their respective contributions.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-08-24T22:14:32Z) - Stop Overvaluing Multi-Agent Debate -- We Must Rethink Evaluation and Embrace Model Heterogeneity [20.408720462383158]
Multi-agent debate (MAD) has gained significant attention as a promising line of research to improve the factual accuracy and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs)<n>Despite its conceptual appeal, current MAD research suffers from critical limitations in evaluation practices.<n>This paper presents a systematic evaluation of 5 representative MAD methods across 9 benchmarks using 4 foundational models.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-02-12T21:01:10Z) - DebUnc: Improving Large Language Model Agent Communication With Uncertainty Metrics [52.242449026151846]
Multi-agent debates have been introduced to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs)<n>We propose DebUnc, a debate framework that uses uncertainty metrics to assess agent confidence.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-07-08T22:15:01Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.