ACL2024

ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs

Justin Chih-Yao Chen, Swarnadeep Saha, Mohit Bansal

34 citations

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with natural language reasoning tasks. Motivated by the society of minds (Minsky, 1988) , we propose RECONCILE, a multi-model multiagent framework designed as a round table conference among diverse LLM agents. RECON-CILE enhances collaborative reasoning between LLM agents via multiple rounds of discussion, learning to convince other agents to improve their answers, and employing a confidenceweighted voting mechanism that leads to a better consensus. In each round, RECONCILE initiates discussion between agents via a 'discussion prompt' that consists of (a) grouped answers and explanations generated by each agent in the previous round, (b) their confidence scores, and (c) demonstrations of answerrectifying human explanations, used for convincing other agents. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that RECONCILE significantly improves LLMs' reasoning -both individually and as a team -surpassing prior single-agent and multi-agent baselines by up to 11.4% and even outperforming GPT-4 on three datasets. RECONCILE also flexibly incorporates different combinations of agents, including API-based, open-source, and domainspecific models, leading to an 8% improvement on MATH. Finally, we analyze the individual components of RECONCILE, demonstrating that the diversity originating from different models is critical to its superior performance. 1 Self-Refine MAD+Judge Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) ReConcile (Group-Discuss-and-Convince) Yes, with 95% confidence No, with 50% confidence No, with 40% confidence yes no no yes no no yes no no Question (Q): Is an ammonia fighting cleaner good for pet owners? Human Explanation (Exp): Ammonia is a component in pet urine. It has an unpleasant odor.