Diverse Thinking: Breaking Oppositions in Debates to Foster Synergized Reasoning via Multi-Agent Collaboration

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission1623 Authors

Keywords: multi-agent diverse thinking (MADT), multi-agent collaboration, complex reasoning, machine translation

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently face limitations, such as judgment biases and cognitive deadlocks, in complex reasoning due to “Degradation of Thought” in self-reflection. While Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) approaches attempt to address this issue, their inherently adversarial nature suppresses diverse perspectives by overemphasizing antagonism, which results in the loss of partially valid reasoning. In this paper, we propose Multi-Agent Diverse Thinking (MADT), a novel cognitive framework that redefines multi-agent collaboration by shifting from adversarial confrontation toward constructive synergy. To break the oppositional deadlock found in traditional debates, MADT decomposes the thinking process into fine-grained modules: an Affirmative Thinker to preserve rational components, a Critical Thinker to rectify errors, and a Growth-Minded Thinker to provide optimization suggestions. These agents jointly foster a synergistic environment where specialized roles protect valid logic while iteratively refining flaws. Meanwhile, a Leader agent coordinates the collaborations and synthesizes the feedback from multiple thinkers to produce the final result. Extensive experiments on Common Machine Translation and Counter-Intuitive Arithmetic Reasoning tasks show that MADT consistently outperforms Self-Reflection and MAD baselines, validating the superior ability to enhance complex logical and reasoning performance in LLMs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MADT-5D3B.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: AI/LLM Agents

Research Area Keywords: LLM/AI agents, machine translation, logical reasoning, model analysis, commonsense reasoning, automatic evaluation

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Theory

Languages Studied: English, Chinese

Submission Number: 1623