CortexDebate: Debating Sparsely and Equally for Multi-Agent Debate

Nowadays, single Large Language Model (LLM) struggles with critical issues such as hallucination and inadequate reasoning abilities.To mitigate these issues, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as an effective strategy, where LLM agents engage in in-depth debates with others on tasks.However, existing MAD methods face two major issues: (a) too lengthy input contexts, which causes LLM agents to get lost in plenty of input information and experiences performance drop; and (b) the overconfidence dilemma, where self-assured LLM agents dominate the debate, leading to low debating effectiveness.To address these limitations, we propose a novel MAD method called "CortexDebate".Inspired by the human brain's tendency to establish a sparse and dynamically optimized network among cortical areas governed by white matter, CortexDebate constructs a sparse debating graph among LLM agents, where each LLM agent only debates with the ones that are helpful to it.To optimize the graph, we propose a module named McKinseybased Debate Matter (MDM), which acts as an artificial analog to white matter.By integrating the McKinsey Trust Formula, a wellestablished measure of trustworthiness from sociology, MDM enables credible evaluations that guide graph optimization.The effectiveness of our CortexDebate has been well demonstrated by extensive experimental results across eight datasets from four task types. Input ContextTask: What is the result of 274 -20 13 -5 + 2 8? 25 Think it step by step.Provide your answer and its explanation.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.495
Primary Topic
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

CortexDebate: Debating Sparsely and Equally for Multi-Agent Debate

Yiliu Sun, Zicheng Zhao, Sheng Wan, Chen Gong
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
article

CortexDebate: Debating Sparsely and Equally for Multi-Agent Debate

Yiliu Sun, Zicheng Zhao, Sheng Wan, Chen Gong
article en

Abstract

Nowadays, single Large Language Model (LLM) struggles with critical issues such as hallucination and inadequate reasoning abilities.To mitigate these issues, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as an effective strategy, where LLM agents engage in in-depth debates with others on tasks.However, existing MAD methods face two major issues: (a) too lengthy input contexts, which causes LLM agents to get lost in plenty of input information and experiences performance drop; and (b) the overconfidence dilemma, where self-assured LLM agents dominate the debate, leading to low debating effectiveness.To address these limitations, we propose a novel MAD method called "CortexDebate".Inspired by the human brain's tendency to establish a sparse and dynamically optimized network among cortical areas governed by white matter, CortexDebate constructs a sparse debating graph among LLM agents, where each LLM agent only debates with the ones that are helpful to it.To optimize the graph, we propose a module named McKinseybased Debate Matter (MDM), which acts as an artificial analog to white matter.By integrating the McKinsey Trust Formula, a wellestablished measure of trustworthiness from sociology, MDM enables credible evaluations that guide graph optimization.The effectiveness of our CortexDebate has been well demonstrated by extensive experimental results across eight datasets from four task types. Input ContextTask: What is the result of 274 -20 13 -5 + 2 8? 25 Think it step by step.Provide your answer and its explanation.

National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Government of Jiangsu Province
Openalex Percentile: Top 90%
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
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