# ECMR: Evidence-Aware Deliberation Control for Multi-Agent LLM Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17869/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 22 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## 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, 22 of 22)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [LLM-Blender: Ensembling Large Language Models with Pairwise Ranking and Generative Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02561/) (2023)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10537/) (2023)
- [ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13007/) (2023)
- [AutoAgents: A Framework for Automatic Agent Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17288/) (2023)
- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [Improving Multi-Agent Debate with Sparse Communication Topology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11776/) (2024)
- [Can ChatGPT Defend its Belief in Truth? Evaluating LLM Reasoning via Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13160/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems typically commit to a deliberation protocol before inference. A fixed protocol cannot allocate computation differently to resolved and unresolved instances, and it may mistake repeated support for independent confirmation. We study this failure as semantic false consensus: a confident group answer supported by narrow, duplicated, or correlated rationales. We introduce ECMR, an evidence-aware controller over frozen role-conditioned LLMs. At each step, ECMR summarizes answer concentration, support diversity and independence, contradictions, role behavior, verification history, and remaining budget, then selects whether to propose, challenge, verify, arbitrate, diversify, correct a role, or stop. We formulate this decision as finite-horizon budgeted control and derive sufficient conditions under which state conditioning, risk-triggered verification, and role correction improve cost-adjusted utility. Across a declared held-out evaluation of 9,000 records from MedQA, CaseHOLD, and FinQA, ECMR-Full increases pooled accuracy from 62.1% to 84.9%, reduces false-consensus rate from 40.7% to 17.0%, and raises evidence-support rate from 58.0% to 88.7%. State shuffling loses 11.7 accuracy points with only 0.7 fewer rounds, while harder traces shift from early stopping toward arbitration. ECMR-Full uses the largest token budget, yielding the strongest absolute reliability rather than uniformly superior token efficiency.