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arXiv · 2610.04686

When Debate Helps: Proposal Supply and Verification-Aware Readout in Multi-Agent Reasoning

Zihao Zhao·Tunyu Zhang·Haizhou Shi·Yusong Zhao·Xinxi Zhang·Hao Wang
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Abstract

Multi-agent debate can improve reasoning, yet often fails to beat simple majority voting. We argue that successful debate requires two distinct mechanisms: proposal supply must surface a correct answer, and readout must identify that answer when voting misses it. We formalize the first requirement through recoverable headroom, which measures cases where a correct proposal is available but the majority answer is wrong. For the second, we develop Latent Verification Debate (LVD), an accounting model in which candidate proposals receive answer-specific verification evidence before final generation. Controlled fixed-proposal interventions estimate this latent effect in equivalent peer-support units and show that correct evidence changes answer probabilities and generated decisions while proposal supply remains fixed. To improve proposal supply, we construct societies from neural-thicket agents using labeled and label-free coverage objectives. Across two backbones and matched-budget reasoning benchmarks, coverage-selected societies increase complementary proposal supply and improve aggregate accuracy in repeated stochastic evaluations. Round-level controls further show that interaction provides gains beyond applying the same finalizer directly to the initial proposals. These results identify proposal coverage and truth-sensitive evidence use as complementary conditions for debate to outperform voting. Code is available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/when-debate-helps.

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Zihao Zhao, Tunyu Zhang, Haizhou Shi, Yusong Zhao, Xinxi Zhang, Hao Wang. 2026-10-03. When Debate Helps: Proposal Supply and Verification-Aware Readout in Multi-Agent Reasoning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04686

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