[Paper] Multiagent Protocols with Aggregated Confidence Signals

Source: arXiv - 2606.13591v1

Overview

Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.

Key Contributions

This paper presents research in the following areas:

• cs.AI
• cs.LG
• cs.MA

Methodology

Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.

Practical Implications

This research contributes to the advancement of cs.AI.

Authors

• Ali Elahi
• Barbara Di Eugenio

Paper Information

• arXiv ID: 2606.13591v1
• Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MA
• Published: June 11, 2026
• PDF: Download PDF