用认知能量差破解辩论困局,让模型团队越辩越准
Breaking the Martingale Curse: Multi-Agent Debate via Asymmetric Cognitive Potential Energy
- 引入不对称认知势能机制,通过预测同伴观点暴露错误共识
- 在6个基准测试中,当多数意见错误时仍能找回真相信号
- 适合需要高可信推理的复杂任务,如科学推断与安全决策
多智能体辩论(MAD)是提升大模型推理能力的新兴范式。然而近期研究发现:标准MAD无法使信念正确率超越多数投票,我们称之为‘马尔可夫诅咒’。该问题源于相关错误导致代理收敛于错误共识,辩论仅强化集体偏差而非过滤噪声。为此提出AceMAD框架,通过利用不对称认知势能,将MAD从随机游走转变为具有正漂移的定向收敛过程。基于同伴预测机制,代理预测其同伴的观点分布,揭示认知势能不对称性:真理持有者不仅知道正确答案,还能预判群体误解;而幻觉多数则无法察觉自身集体错误。这种不对称性通过严格合适评分规则量化为势能差。理论证明该认知势能体现为信息论优势,并在非线性聚合下转化为向真值的次鞅漂移,直接打破马尔可夫诅咒。六项挑战性基准测试结果表明,即使初始多数意见错误,AceMAD仍能有效恢复稀疏真理信号,显著优于基线方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing large language model reasoning. However, recent work reveals a limitation:standard MAD cannot improve belief correctness beyond majority voting; we refer to this as the Martingale Curse. This curse arises because correlated errors cause agents to converge toward erroneous consensus, where debate merely reinforces collective mistakes rather than filtering noise. We propose AceMAD, a framework that breaks the Martingale Curse by harnessing asymmetric cognitive potential energy to transform MAD from a random walk into a directed convergence process with positive drift. Through a peer-prediction mechanism, agents predict their peers' belief distributions, revealing asymmetric cognitive potential: truth-holders not only know the correct answer but also anticipate the crowd's misconceptions, while the hallucinating majority remains blind to their collective error. This asymmetry creates a potential energy gap that we quantify via strictly proper scoring rules. We prove this cognitive potential manifests as information-theoretic superiority and, under nonlinear aggregation, converts into submartingale drift toward truth, directly breaking the Martingale Curse. Experiments on challenging subsets across six benchmarks show AceMAD recovers sparse truth signals even when initial majorities are incorrect, substantially outperforming baseline methods.
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