# Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18272/

## Key facts

- Cited by 159 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 25 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03350/) (2022)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05128/) (2023)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02406/) (2022)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13007/) (2023)
- [Deductive Verification of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03872/) (2023)
- [Successive Prompting for Decomposing Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04092/) (2022)
- [Mind's Eye: Grounded Language Model Reasoning through Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05359/) (2022)
- [RCOT: Detecting and Rectifying Factual Inconsistency in Reasoning by Reversing Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11499/) (2023)
- [Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14497/) (2023)
- [Re-Reading Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06275/) (2023)
- [LogicSolver: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Logical Prompt-enhanced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08232/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 159)

- [Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04692/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06322/) (2025)
- [RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20073/) (2025)
- [Scaling Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07155/) (2024)
- [When Can LLMs Actually Correct Their Own Mistakes? A Critical Survey of Self-Correction of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01297/) (2024)
- [The Landscape of Emerging AI Agent Architectures for Reasoning, Planning, and Tool Calling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11584/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Design: Optimizing Agents with Better Prompts and Topologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02533/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Frontiers in LLM Reasoning: Inference Scaling, Learning to Reason, and Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09037/) (2025)
- [Improving Multi-Agent Debate with Sparse Communication Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11776/) (2024)
- [From LLMs to LLM-based Agents for Software Engineering: A Survey of Current, Challenges and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02479/) (2024)
- [Debate or Vote: Which Yields Better Decisions in Multi-Agent Large Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17536/) (2025)
- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning Enhanced LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10400/) (2024)
- [Many Heads Are Better Than One: Improved Scientific Idea Generation by A LLM-Based Multi-Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09403/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Verification: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Multiple Verifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20379/) (2025)
- [Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19130/) (2025)
- [OdysseyBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Complex Office Application Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09124/) (2025)
- [Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05695/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Mixture-of-Agents: Is Mixing Different Large Language Models Beneficial?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00674/) (2025)
- [SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04780/) (2025)
- [Stop Overvaluing Multi-Agent Debate -- We Must Rethink Evaluation and Embrace Model Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08788/) (2025)
- [Hogwild! Inference: Parallel LLM Generation via Concurrent Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06261/) (2025)
- [OSC: Cognitive Orchestration through Dynamic Knowledge Alignment in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04876/) (2025)
- [MAS-ZERO: Designing Multi-Agent Systems with Zero Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14996/) (2025)
- [OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05606/) (2025)
- [Model Swarms: Collaborative Search to Adapt LLM Experts via Swarm Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11163/) (2024)
- [LLMs Can Generate a Better Answer by Aggregating Their Own Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04104/) (2025)
- [Automate Strategy Finding with LLM in Quant Investment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06289/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent Large Language Models for Conversational Task-Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22932/) (2024)
- [ACC-Collab: An Actor-Critic Approach to Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00053/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in LLMs discussion suggests that multi-agent discussion improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs. In this work, we reevaluate this claim through systematic experiments, where we propose a novel group discussion framework to enrich the set of discussion mechanisms. Interestingly, our results show that a single-agent LLM with strong prompts can achieve almost the same performance as the best existing discussion approach on a wide range of reasoning tasks and backbone LLMs. We observe that the multi-agent discussion performs better than a single agent only when there is no demonstration in the prompt. Further study reveals the common interaction mechanisms of LLMs during the discussion.