mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Multi-agent decision making: A Blackwell's informativeness approach

arXiv 2605.06028 ↗First posted 7 May 2026cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate

Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has motivated research on decision-making in multi-agent systems, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve shared objectives. Existing aggregation approaches, such as voting and debate, are largely ad-hoc and lack formal guarantees regarding the informativeness of the resulting decisions. In this paper, we provide a principled approach to analyse decisions made in the multi-LLM setting using Blackwell's informativeness framework. Within the Blackwell information-structure abstraction, we show that voting and debate induce information structures that are no more informative than the pooled private information of all agents. This result identifies Bayesian pooled posterior maximisation as an information-theoretic upper-bound decision rule under the Blackwell ordering. Motivated by this theoretical analysis, we introduce a practical method for LLM-based question-answering (QA) tasks that estimates each agent's posterior and approximates the pooled posterior using a product-of-posteriors estimator. Extensive experiments on six QA benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art multi-LLM debate and voting methods.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (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 49 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.

Builds on

49 of 66 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Beyond Majority Voting: LLM Aggregation by Leveraging Higher-Order Information1 Oct
  2. 2025Free-MAD: Consensus-Free Multi-Agent Debate14 Sep
  3. 2025Debate or Vote: Which Yields Better Decisions in Multi-Agent Large Language Models?24 Aug
  4. 2025Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debate26 Feb
  5. 2025Stop Overvaluing Multi-Agent Debate -- We Must Rethink Evaluation and Embrace Model Heterogeneity12 Feb
  6. 2024GroupDebate: Enhancing the Efficiency of Multi-Agent Debate Using Group Discussion21 Sep

Other references · 43

  1. 2019PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Librarycited by 20,305
  2. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  3. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  5. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,963
  6. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,708
  7. 2017On Calibration of Modern Neural Networkscited by 4,960
  8. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,942
  9. 2019HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?cited by 4,100
  10. 2022Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 3,720
  11. 2017Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layercited by 3,509
  12. 2022Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Knowcited by 1,856
31 more
  1. 2022Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledgecited by 1,830
  2. 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,822
  3. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,784
  4. 2022Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCodecited by 1,462
  5. 2017Deep Setscited by 1,421
  6. 2022Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Modelscited by 1,392
  7. 2023Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMscited by 974
  8. 2023Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedbackcited by 812
  9. 2024Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challengescited by 769
  10. 2022Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Wordscited by 751
  11. 2023ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debatecited by 742
  12. 2023RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with AI Feedbackcited by 625
  13. 2023LLM-Blender: Ensembling Large Language Models with Pairwise Ranking and Generative Fusioncited by 564
  14. 2022MedMCQA : A Large-scale Multi-Subject Multi-Choice Dataset for Medical domain Question Answeringcited by 543
  15. 2020Monotonic Value Function Factorisation for Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 485
  16. 2025LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversationcited by 429
  17. 2019QTRAN: Learning to Factorize with Transformation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 379
  18. 2023Generating with Confidence: Uncertainty Quantification for Black-box Large Language Modelscited by 293
  19. 2017A Unified Game-Theoretic Approach to Multiagent Reinforcement Learningcited by 268
  20. 2024Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answerscited by 266
  21. 2023DDCoT: Duty-Distinct Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multimodal Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 128
  22. 2023PRD: Peer Rank and Discussion Improve Large Language Model based Evaluationscited by 114
  23. 2024Improving Multi-Agent Debate with Sparse Communication Topologycited by 107
  24. 2023Boosting Language Models Reasoning with Chain-of-Knowledge Promptingcited by 77
  25. 2025Falcon-H1: A Family of Hybrid-Head Language Models Redefining Efficiency and Performancecited by 57
  26. 2023Debate Helps Supervise Unreliable Expertscited by 43
  27. 2021Wisdom of the Crowd Voting: Truthful Aggregation of Voter Information and Preferencescited by 7
  28. 2023Robust Decision Aggregation with Second-order Informationcited by 7
  29. 2025Representation Consistency for Accurate and Coherent LLM Answer Aggregationcited by 5
  30. 2017Leader-Based Optimal Coordination Control for the Consensus Problem of Multiagent Differential Games via Fuzzy Adaptive Dynamic Programmingcited by 3
  31. 2017Aggregating incoherent agents who disagreecited by 1

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025From Debate to Equilibrium: Belief-Driven Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning via Bayesian Nash Equilibrium
  2. 2025UProp: Investigating the Uncertainty Propagation of LLMs in Multi-Step Agentic Decision-Making
  3. 2025From Belief Entrenchment to Robust Reasoning in LLM Agents
  4. 2025Multi-Agent Debate for LLM Judges with Adaptive Stability Detection
  5. 2026Uncertainty Quantification for LLM Agents: A Taxonomy, an Evaluation Protocol, and an Empirical Study
  6. 2026DiscoUQ: Structured Disagreement Analysis for Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agent Ensembles
  7. 2026Do Reasoning Models Ask Better Questions? A Formal Information-Theoretic Analysis on Multi-Turn LLM Games
  8. 2025Debate Only When Necessary: Adaptive Multiagent Collaboration for Efficient LLM Reasoning