Bias Control and Injection for Multi-Agent Aggregation

Abstract

Multi-agent reasoning with large language models (LLMs) raises a central question for collective decision-making: when agents disagree, whose decision should be trusted? Resolving such disagreements is difficult because agents' decisions are susceptible to non-semantic biases such as majority pressure and response-style preferences, which can obscure the quality of the underlying reasoning. Our analysis shows how bias can be both mitigated and exploited: bias control improves initial answer selection, while bias injection elicits decision instability that serves as a reliability signal. Building on these findings, we introduce a test-time aggregation framework that requires neither validation data nor prior knowledge of relative model strength. The framework implements bias control by presenting one style-normalized reasoning trace per distinct answer, and bias injection by placing each aggregating agent's initially selected answer in the minority. Overall, our framework achieves higher average accuracy and better token efficiency than competing non-oracle aggregation methods across three mathematical reasoning benchmarks and four heterogeneous LLM combinations. It also improves final-answer accuracy when applied to multi-agent debate and Mixture-of-Agents, without modifying their interaction or synthesis processes.