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#1 A Diagnostic Study of Multi-Agent LLMs for Real-World Debates [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Priya Pitre, Gaurav Srivastava, Lu Zhang, Le Wang, Naren Ramakrishnan, Xuan Wang

Multi-agent LLM debates are increasingly used in domains such as policy, politics, and city planning, where ground truth is often unavailable. Yet existing evaluations rely heavily on outcome-based proxies such as consensus, majority vote, or LLM-as-judge scores, which can miss failures like sycophancy, domination, and premature convergence. We introduce a diagnostic framework that evaluates both debate outcomes and the deliberative process using interpretable metrics for engagement, responsiveness, influence asymmetry, balance, stability, and agent utility. Across real-world debate settings and validation benchmarks, our process-level diagnostics align more closely with human judgments and reveal interaction failures that standard outcome-only measures overlook. These results show that reliable evaluation of multi-agent debates requires measuring not only what answer agents reach, but how they reach it.

Subject: ICML.2026 - Poster