arXiv Machine Learning

Reliable Fusion of Conflicting Experts

The paper introduces a probabilistic‑circuit framework for fusing opinions from multiple black‑box experts in noisy, conflict‑prone environments. It dynamically assigns context‑specific credibility to each expert, allowing reliable aggregation without needing access to their internal models or retraining. Experiments on multiple‑choice question answering with large language models show that this method outperforms individual models and static ensemble baselines, consistently improving predictive accuracy and decision reliability under disagreement.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Confidence Composition for Multiagent Language Model Systems

The paper addresses the lack of system‑level confidence estimates in multiagent language model systems such as collaborative reasoning and debate. It introduces confidence composition methods, including confidence‑aware routing and log‑odds pooling, to combine agent confidences while maintaining selective utility and probabilistic reliability. Experiments on five benchmarks with diverse model pairs show that gated‑fusion techniques improve AUARC and Brier scores compared to single‑agent and standard debate baselines, and a shared dependence discount further enhances reliability.

By Ali Elahi, Michael J. Curry, Barbara Di Eugenio
arXiv AI
1d ago

Counting Moves, Weighing Voices: Bayesian Dialectical Argumentation for Calibrated Multi-LLM Councils under Persistent Adversaries

The paper introduces Bayesian Dialectical Argumentation (BDA), a method for aggregating answers from multiple large language models (LLMs) in a council setting. BDA treats each LLM’s typed moves—proposals, challenges, and concessions—as evidence in a classical annotator model, estimating per-agent reliability even when some agents are persistently unreliable. By weighting evidence according to these inferred reliabilities, BDA produces calibrated posterior probabilities for candidate answers and can invert unreliable agents instead of merely outvoting them, achieving superior calibration and robustness on both binary and multi-class benchmarks without extra LLM calls.

By Ionel Eduard Stan, Paolo Napoletano
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Navigating Unreliable Parametric and Contextual Knowledge: Explicit Knowledge Conflict Resolution for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 20245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of language-based tasks by leveraging both extensive parametric knowledge and in-context learning ability, enabling them to incorporate external information provided in the input prompt.

By Huang Peng, Jiuyang Tang, Weixin Zeng, Hao Xu, Xiang Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Multi-Expert Conformal Risk Control for Pairwise LLM Judging in Open-Ended Dialogue

The paper introduces multi-expert Conformal Risk Control (CRC) algorithms for pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation in open-ended dialogue. Two initial methods—Score Averaging and Decision Voting—aggregate at the score and decision levels, respectively, and outperform single-expert approaches on homogeneous expert panels. To address limited coverage on heterogeneous panels, the authors propose Marginal‑Calibrated Conformal Consensus (MC3), which captures distinct per‑expert scoring scales through threshold ratios while maintaining a unified decision function, and demonstrate its effectiveness on a new 1,800‑pair human pairwise‑preference benchmark called Panel.

By Ming Cheng, Yusheng Dai, Qiuhong Ke, Zhaolin Chen, Lizhen Qu
arXiv AI
Sep 12

When Agents Disagree: Bayesian Backward Reasoning as a Label-Free Anchor for Multi-Agent Collective Decision-Making

The paper introduces Bayesian backward reasoning as a label‑free anchor for multi‑agent collective decision‑making. By constructing reverse posteriors from explicit likelihoods, the authors obtain differently factorized approximations of the underlying posterior, reducing shared errors among agents. Using Jensen‑Shannon divergence to rank agents, they propose three aggregation strategies—hard selection (MinJS), soft reweighting (FwdJS), and log‑linear fusion (LogLin)—which consistently outperform baseline methods on the DDXPlus benchmark across five LLM backbones, especially when agents disagree.

By Ken Chen, Wei Wang, Sachith Seneviratne, Hansani Weeratunge, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv AI
Aug 24

DirEAG: Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation for Calibrating Verbalized Confidence in Mathematical Reasoning

DirEAG introduces a Dirichlet Evidence Aggregation technique to calibrate verbalized confidence in large language models performing mathematical reasoning. By converting each elicited answer-confidence pair into calibrated soft evidence over candidate answers and a null state, it addresses prompt- and task-dependent bias that simple averaging or heuristic aggregation cannot handle. Experiments on GSM8K, SVAMP, and GSM-Hard with Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma models demonstrate that DirEAG achieves better calibration while maintaining competitive answer selection compared to existing methods.

By Haorui Xu, Yuzhou Zhu, Liyuan Gao