错误消息也可能有推理价值,关键看是否促进后续思考。
Wrong but Useful: Trajectory Value Beyond Answer Correctness in Multi-Agent Messages

- 用重播实验测量消息对后续推理的影响,而非仅看答案对错。
- 超过40%的错误消息能提升最终正确率,且效果可重复验证。
- 适合改进多智能体系统决策机制的研究者与工程师参考。
多智能体推理系统通常依赖一致、置信度或自动评分来筛选信息。但错误答案可能包含有用的分解思路、约束条件或科学原理。本文通过受控实验协议DHD,缓存五个独立生成的消息,并在相同下游求解器(集成器)上逐个重放,评估每条消息的轨迹价值:即提供该消息是否有助于后续推理。在五个数学与科学基准测试中,使用gpt-oss-120b和gemma-4-31B-it两个模型,所有组合均发现错误但有帮助的消息。在改变最终结果的错误消息中,超过40%的案例具有正向影响。重复实验表明,此类效应极不可能由重播波动导致(p=0.0002)。针对性干预显示,完整消息优于仅保留答案;完整推理过程比仅保留结论更有效。同一问题内,轨迹价值可指导更优的保留/剔除决策,说明答案正确性不足以决定消息价值。DHD能测量这一缺失属性,并生成可用于训练的可复用标签。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multi-agent reasoning systems often use agreement, confidence, or automated scores to decide which messages should shape a final answer. Such filtering assumes that a message likely to be correct is also worth keeping. Yet a wrong answer can contain a useful decomposition, constraint, or scientific principle. We test this distinction with Diverse Hypothesis Deliberation (DHD), a controlled measurement protocol that caches five independently generated messages and replays the same downstream solver, called the integrator, with each message available or hidden. The replay comparison measures a message's trajectory value: whether making the message available helps or harms subsequent reasoning. Across five mathematics and science benchmarks and two openly available model families, gpt-oss-120b and gemma-4-31B-it, wrong-helpful messages appear in every benchmark-model combination. Among wrong-answer messages that change final correctness, more than four in ten changes are helpful in each model. Controlled repeats show that the number of repeatable message effects is unlikely to arise from replay variation alone (p=0.0002). A focused intervention on repeatable wrong-helpful messages finds that the complete message works best, while retaining its reasoning preserves more success than retaining only its answer; the source of the complete-message advantage remains open. Within the same problem, repeated trajectory-value evidence also identifies a better keep-or-remove choice than answer correctness alone. Answer correctness is therefore informative but does not determine trajectory value. DHD measures this missing property and produces reusable labels for learning when agents should listen.
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