Abstract:Multi-agent LLM systems aim to improve reasoning through debate, evidence sharing, and mutual correction, but interaction can also introduce failures that final accuracy alone cannot explain. Agents may converge too early, ignore dissent, suppress correct minority answers, or preserve a wrong framing across rounds. We present a corpus-grounded taxonomy of communication failures, built from 3,211 failed multi-round trajectories across medical QA, coding, finance, multi-hop reasoning, ethics, and embodied text tasks. Using this taxonomy, we analyze failure distributions across datasets and system designs, round-level error dynamics, recovery hardness, majority transitions, minority-signal suppression, and self-reported confidence. We find that failures are dominated by recovery/correction and consensus/decision problems rather than isolated first-round mistakes, with many emerging after agents first observe peer responses. Based on these findings, we recommend stronger disagreement handling, evidence verification, minority-signal preservation, and recovery checks before finalization.
Submission history
Access Paper:
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
Additional Features
Audio Summary
Current browse context:
References & Citations
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Bookmark
Institution
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.