EMNLP Findings2025
DebUnc: Improving Large Language Model Agent Communication With Uncertainty Metrics
Luke Yoffe, Alfonso Amayuelas, William Yang Wang
Abstract
Multi-agent debates have been introduced to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) by having multiple agents discuss solutions to a problem over several rounds of debate. However, models often generate incorrect yet confident-sounding responses, which can mislead the others. This issue arises partly because agents do not consider how confident their peers are. To address this, we propose De-bUnc, a debate framework that uses uncertainty metrics to assess agent confidence. Confidence is then conveyed through textual prompts or via a modified attention mechanism that adjusts token weights. Evaluations across benchmarks show that attention-based methods are particularly effective and that performance continues to improve as uncertainty estimation becomes more reliable. The code is available at https://github.com/lukeyoffe/debunc.
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Cited by top-tier papers6
- GAM-Agent: Game-Theoretic and Uncertainty-Aware Collaboration for Complex Visual ReasoningJusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Wenjun Lin, Ruiqi Chen et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 75 citations
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- Epistemic Gain, Aleatoric Cost: Uncertainty Decomposition in Multi-Agent Debate for Math ReasoningDan Qiao, Binbin Chen, Fengyu Cai, Jianlong Chen et al.ICML 2026 · 3 citations
Builds on17
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- ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent DebateChi-Min Chan, Weize Chen, Yusheng Su, Jianxuan Yu et al.ICLR 2024 · 871 citations
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