Breaking Mental Set to Improve Reasoning through Diverse Multi-Agent Debate

Yexiang Liu, Jie Cao, Zekun Li, Ran He, Tieniu Tan

Keywords: Multi-Agent Debate, Large Language Models, Multimodal Large Language Models, Prompting, Self-Correction, Reasoning

Abstract:

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen significant progress but continue to struggle with persistent reasoning mistakes.
Previous methods of *self-reflection* have been proven limited due to the models’ inherent fixed thinking patterns.
While Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) attempts to mitigate this by incorporating multiple agents, it often employs the same reasoning methods, even though assigning different personas to models. This leads to a "fixed mental set", where models rely on homogeneous thought processes without exploring alternative perspectives.
In this paper, we introduce Diverse Multi-Agent Debate (DMAD), a method that encourages agents to think with distinct reasoning approaches. By leveraging diverse problem-solving strategies, each agent can gain insights from different perspectives, refining its responses through discussion and collectively arriving at the optimal solution. DMAD effectively breaks the limitations of fixed mental sets. We evaluate DMAD against various prompting techniques, including *self-reflection* and traditional MAD, across multiple benchmarks using both LLMs and Multimodal LLMs. Our experiments show that DMAD consistently outperforms other methods, delivering better results than MAD in fewer rounds. Code is available at https://github.com/MraDonkey/DMAD.

Primary Area: generative models

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Submission Number: 11487