CascadeDebate: Multi-Agent Deliberation for Cost-Aware LLM Cascades
Raeyoung Chang, Dongwook Kwon, Jisoo Lee, Nikhil Verma
Cascaded LLM systems coordinate models of varying sizes with human experts to balance accuracy, cost, and abstention under uncertainty. However, single-model tiers at each stage falter on ambiguous queries, triggering premature escalations to costlier models or experts due to under-confidence and inefficient compute scaling. CascadeDebate addresses this critical gap by inserting multi-agent deliberation directly at each tier’s escalation boundary. Confidence-based routers activate lightweight agent ensembles only for uncertain cases, enabling consensus-driven resolution of ambiguities internally, without invoking higher-cost upgrades. Our unified architecture alternates single-model inference with selective multi-agent deliberation across model scales, culminating in human experts as final fallback. This design scales test-time compute dynamically to query difficulty. Across five benchmarks spanning science, medicine, and general knowledge, CascadeDebate outperforms strong single-model cascades and standalone multi-agent systems by up to 26.75%.An online threshold optimizer proves essential, boosting accuracy 20.98–52.33% relative improvement over fixed policies and enabling elastic adaptation to real-world distributions.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表