arXiv:2605. 13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation.
By Erica Zhang, Fangzhao Zhang, Aneesh Pappu, Batu El, Jose Blanchet, Susan Athey, Jiashuo Liu, James Zou
The study evaluates multi‑agent debate (MAD) in small language models, testing whether cognitive diversity—via personas, sampling temperature, or model identity—drives performance gains. Across 23 models, five tasks, and over 5,500 runs, MAD consistently outperforms single‑model inference but, when matched for generation budget, it ties or falls behind self‑consistency sampling, with persona prompting actually reducing accuracy. The authors find that MAD’s benefits largely stem from the first answer exchange and that many reported gains are due to ensemble‑sampling effects rather than true diversity, highlighting the need for budget‑matched, contamination‑checked baselines.
whyItMatters":"The findings clarify that MAD’s perceived advantages may be overestimated and that future debate mechanisms must be evaluated against rigorous, budget‑matched baselines to ensure genuine performance improvements."
By Leonardo Ferreira, Gardenia Liu, Kaden Zheng
arXiv:2608.23541v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Does multi-agent LLM interaction help or hurt? Some work reports gains from debate (Du et al., 2024), critique loops (Chen et al., 2025), and mixture...
By Summer Eunhyung Ann, Haokun Liu, Chenhao Tan
arXiv:2607. 18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic-population tools increasingly run every individual as an independent large language model (LLM) agent.
By Gurkan Ozkan
The paper introduces SILICA, an open instrument designed to evaluate whether large language model (LLM) agent societies replicate human behavioural distributions. Using five environments with human‑anchored data and perturbations, the study finds that most LLMs only match human behaviour at initial stages, failing to reproduce end‑state cooperation or correct acceptance thresholds. The results suggest that current LLM societies can support exploratory claims but do not yet reliably emulate human social dynamics.
By Raad Bin Tareaf
The paper introduces TalkMesh, a decentralized network of small language model agents that learn to communicate effectively during inference. Each agent proposes an answer, scores it with a confidence head, and the most confident agent broadcasts a hint; lower‑confidence agents revise their proposals if a new suggestion scores higher. This gossip‑based consensus, trained via group relative policy optimization, enables a mesh of three agents to match the accuracy of majority voting over 32 samples, and scales to larger meshes to significantly boost performance on benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH-500.
By Mehmet Kerem Turkcan
arXiv:2607. 15434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems routinely place one AI agent in authority over another.
By Jasmine Brazilek, Maheep Chaudhary, Zoe Lu, Miles Tidmarsh
arXiv:2609.24146v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language model agents are increasingly used to simulate social interaction, and the resulting transcripts read as though the agents understand one anot...
By Cong Li, Cheng Chen, Thomas Fung, Alex Rossi, Yi Li
The study examines how Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning and prosocial beliefs influence large language models (LLMs) in the ultimatum game. By initializing LLM agents with Greedy, Fair, or Selfless beliefs and applying chain‑of‑thought or varying levels of ToM reasoning, the authors ran 2,700 simulations across several models, including o3‑mini and DeepSeek‑R1 Distilled Qwen 32B. Results show that ToM‑enhanced LLMs align more closely with human decision patterns, exhibit greater consistency, and achieve better negotiation outcomes, with Llama 3.3 70B producing the most belief‑consistent reasoning.
whyItMatters":"The findings clarify the importance of incorporating Theory of Mind into LLMs to improve their alignment with human norms in cooperative decision‑making tasks."
By Neemesh Yadav, Yihuai Lan, Shan Dong, Mai Hieu Hien, Palakorn Achananuparp, Jing Jiang, Ee-Peng Lim
arXiv:2609.08016v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-agent debate, in which several LLMs exchange arguments before answering, is widely assumed to improve answer quality by surfacing genuine disagre...
By Chen Qian
arXiv:2606. 30454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents in simulations of social systems, yet it remains unclear when their behavior can be interpreted as a faithful proxy for human decision-making.
By Henrique Ferraz de Arruda, Carlos Gracia L\'azaro, Alberto Aleta, Yamir Moreno
arXiv:2608. 06741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is often grounded in human text, human demonstrations, and human-generated rationales.
By Han Wang, Philippe Beardsell, Boning Li, Aaron Sasmita, Shuai Li, Hongyuan Zha, Baoxiang Wang