CORTEXA
← Browse
arxivcs.MAcs.CLcs.LGeess.SY2026-06-25

Delayed Verification Destabilizes Multi-Agent LLM Belief: Instability Thresholds and Optimal Corrector Placement

Igor Itkin

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems often rely on verifier and critic agents to suppress hallucinations, but verification is delayed. During this delay, false claims can propagate through the agent network. We model this process as delayed consensus on a graph with grounded corrector nodes. Spectral decomposition by the grounded Laplacian yields a closed-form stability threshold for the verification dose: correction that is too strong or too delayed can turn consensus into oscillation. The most unstable regime occurs when the communication and verification delays coincide; for delay two, the threshold is the inverse golden ratio. The same framework gives a supermodular placement objective and a greedy (1-1/e)-approximation rule for assigning a limited corrector budget to influential nodes. Experiments across five open models confirm the predicted dose-delay oscillations. By contrast, grounded factual answering makes truth an absorbing boundary and eliminates the effect, suggesting that the instability is specific to signed-belief tasks while grounded verification remains stabilizing

View free PDFSource page

Related papers

arxivcs.AIcs.CLcs.MAeess.SYmath.OC2026-07-07

How Much Does Correctness Cost? Budgeted Placement of Strong Correctors in a Weak Multi-Agent Swarm

Igor Itkin

A cheap swarm of unreliable agents can be steered to a correct consensus by a few strong, expensive "oracle" correctors. We ask how much one must spend, and where to place the oracles. We model the swarm as a consensus on a graph in which each oracle pins one node toward the trut…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.AIcs.CLcs.LGcs.MA2026-07-02

What LLM Agents Say When No One Is Watching: Social Structure and Latent Objective Emergence in Multi-Agent Debates

Arman Ghaffarizadeh, Danyal Mohaddes, Aliakbar Izadkhah, Shahriar Noroozizadeh

LLM agents will increasingly act in socially structured settings where role, audience, and relational context can shape what is advantageous or costly to say. We study whether such social structure, without any explicit objective in the prompt, changes what an agent expresses pub…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.AIcs.CLcs.LGcs.MA2026-07-07

Norm Enforcement for AI Agents: Robustly Shaping Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems

Yaowen Ye, Jacob Steinhardt

AI agents are increasingly deployed in shared environments where they pursue diverse goals and compete for rewards. This multi-agent competition can lead to behaviors that serve individual gains at collective cost -- for instance, marketing agents may post misleading content as a…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.CLcs.LGcs.MA2026-07-13

Fine-Tuned Multi-Agent Framework for Detecting OCEAN in Life Narratives

Rasiq Hussain, Darshil Italiya, Joshua Oltmanns, Mehak Gupta

Accurately assessing personality from text is challenging because traits are latent, context-dependent, and often subtly expressed across long narratives. Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities by processing extensive textual contexts, but pretraining of these model…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.CLcs.MA2026-07-20

MADA-RL: Multi-Agent Debate-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Parameter-Efficient Reasoning in Compact Models

Martino M. L. Pulici, Cuong Xuan Chu, Evgeny Kharlamov, Zifeng Ding, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma

Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance, but often at prohibitive training cost - a challenge that is especially acute for compact models ($\leq 4 \, \mathrm{B}$ parameters) trained under limited budgets. We introduce MADA-RL, a post-training framework that spe…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.CLcs.AIcs.LGcs.MA2026-06-28

Hybrid Retriever Evolution for Multimodal Document Reasoning Agents

Bohan Yao, Shruthan Radhakrishna, Vikas Yadav

Different retrievers, including lexical, semantic, and multimodal approaches, provide highly complementary strengths for multimodal document understanding, yet most systems combine them through fixed pipelines that cannot adapt to the demands of individual reasoning steps. In thi…

View free PDFSource page