AI & ML
From Debate to Decision: Conformal Social Choice for Safe Multi-Agent Deliberation
arXiv cs.MA0 views
arXiv:2604.07667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent debate improves LLM reasoning, yet agreement is not evidence of correctness. When agents converge on a wrong answer through social reinforcement, consensus stopping commits that error to automated action with no recourse. We introduce Conformal Social Choice, a post-hoc layer that converts debate outputs into calibrated act-versus-escalate decisions. Verbalized probability distributions from heterogeneous agents are aggregated via a linear opinion pool and calibrated with split conformal prediction, yielding fixed-round marginal coverage: at any pre-specified round, the correct answer is included with probability ${\geq}\,1{-}\alpha$, without assumptions on individual model calibration. A hierarchical action policy maps singletons to autonomous action and larger sets to human escalation. Across eight MMLU-Pro domains and two additional benchmarks, fixed-round coverage stays close to target. The key finding is not that debate becomes more accurate, but that the conformal layer makes its failures actionable: at the final round, 81.9\% of wrong-consensus cases are flagged by non-singleton sets at $\alpha{=}0.05$. Separately, among cases that reach a singleton before the final round, accuracy reaches 90.0--96.8\% on MMLU-Pro (up to 22.1pp above consensus stopping): a selection effect, not a reasoning improvement. Simple probability- and entropy-threshold rules attain comparable interception; conformal's distinct value is a finite-sample fixed-round coverage guarantee together with explicit candidate sets for escalation. Adaptive first-singleton stopping is evaluated empirically and not covered by this guarantee.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07667PreviousGenoMAS: Guided Multi-Agent Programming for Scientific Discovery from Genomic DataNextNon-Stationarity Breaks Permutation Surrogates in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Diagnosis and Remedies
Related posts
LifeVal
0OpenAI Blog
Claude’s new rules against game cloning won’t stop the AI copying boom
0Ars Technica

OpenAI pitches data center power plants as a way to protect nearby areas
0The Verge

Anthropic clamps down on Claude’s AI video game clones
0The Verge
Readwise takes on Amazon’s Kindle and Goodreads with its new app for book lovers
0TechCrunch
Five regression tests for channel-aware AI reply drafts
0dev.to