The Consensus Trap: Rescuing Multi-Agent LLMs from Adversarial Majorities via Token-Level Collaboration
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate
Abstract (arXiv)
Multi-agent large language model (LLM) architectures increasingly rely on response-level aggregation, such as Majority Voting (MAJ), to raise reasoning ceilings. However, in open environments, agents are highly susceptible to stealthy contextual corruption, such as targeted prompt injections. We reveal a critical structural vulnerability in current multi-agent systems: response-level aggregation collapses when corrupted agents form a local majority. Because voting aggregates fully-formed conclusions, it is blind to flawed intermediate logic. To overcome this systematic limitation, we propose the Token-Level Round-Robin (RR) Collaboration, where agents sequentially interleave generation within a shared auto-regressive context. We formalize this process as a discrete-time dynamical system, proving that token-level interleaving transitions aggregation from a brittle counting of final votes (a linear sum) to a dynamic, interwoven chain of logic (a non-linear operator product). Through this theoretical lens, we prove that the honest model's restorative pull can overpower adversarial corruptions, even when corrupted agents form a majority. We conduct an exhaustive empirical evaluation across diverse reasoning benchmarks and demonstrate that while MAJ collapses when corrupted agents reach a majority, RR maintains robust accuracy well beyond this critical threshold.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 20 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.
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Other references · 19
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026LCGuard: Latent Communication Guard for Safe KV Sharing in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 6
- 2026MasDrift: Benchmarking Authorization Preservation Across Multi-Agent Architecturescited by 4
- 2026Not Just RLHF: Why Alignment Alone Won't Fix Multi-Agent Sycophancycited by 3
- 2026Beyond Memory Majority: Latent-Source Reasoning for Multi-Agent Memory Arbitrationcited by 3
- 2026AutoCRAT: Within-trajectory Joint Control of Stochasticity and Compute for LLM Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026Inference-Time Consensus for Mitigating Hidden Behaviors from LLM Fine-Tuningcited by 1
- 2026SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systemscited by 1
- 2026Self-Cleaning and Captured Anyway: One Measured Primitive for Error in a Store an Agent Writes to Itself, and What a Falling Score Actually Measurescited by 0
- 2026Self-Cleaning and Captured Anyway: One Measured Primitive for Error in a Store an Agent Writes to Itself, and What a Falling Score Actually Measures6 Sep 2026
- 2026SoK: When Safe Agents Fail Together: The Security of Multi Agent LLM Systems1 Sep 2026
- 2026AutoCRAT: Within-trajectory Joint Control of Stochasticity and Compute for LLM Reasoning30 Aug 2026
- 2026Beyond Memory Majority: Latent-Source Reasoning for Multi-Agent Memory Arbitration20 Aug 2026
- 2026MasDrift: Benchmarking Authorization Preservation Across Multi-Agent Architectures2 Aug 2026
- 2026Inference-Time Consensus for Mitigating Hidden Behaviors from LLM Fine-Tuning25 Jul 2026
- 2026LCGuard: Latent Communication Guard for Safe KV Sharing in Multi-Agent Systems21 May 2026
- 2026Not Just RLHF: Why Alignment Alone Won't Fix Multi-Agent Sycophancy13 May 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026Auditing Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning Trees Outperforms Majority Vote and LLM-as-Judge
- 2025TAMAS: Benchmarking Adversarial Risks in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
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