arXiv AI By Ling Tang, Jilin Mei, Qian Chen, Qihan Ren, Linfeng Zhang, Quanshi Zhang, Jing Shao, Xia Hu, Dongrui Liu

Attributing Emergence in Million-Agent Systems

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arXiv:2605. 11404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can simulate human-like reasoning and decision-making in individual agents.

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arXiv AI
4d ago

Beyond Symmetric Agents: Cognitive Diversity and Multi-Agent Debate in Small Language Models

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