Local Agreement Does Not Imply Global Consensus in LLM Panels
Machiko Hirota, Akshara Nadayanur Sathis Kanna, Ujwal Kumar, Phan Xuan Tan
原文摘要
Local coordination in an LLM panel need not produce a common answer. We study 50-agent panels that update clock-time estimates after observing their neighbours. This circular response space separates agreement across the whole panel from agreement within neighbourhoods. Increasing the reasoning effort of gpt-5-mini reduces variation in local agreement, but all 20 higher-effort trials retain a one-twist configuration: neighbouring estimates remain close while the panel spans the clock. Degree-preserving rewiring instead produces global synchronisation in all 25 primary clock controls. These classifications are unchanged across 2,187 combinations of diagnostic thresholds and reporting windows. A radius-, effort-, and passage-matched scoring task also shows more uniform local agreement after rewiring, without establishing greater scoring accuracy. A simple averaging model helps interpret the clock results but predicts their configurations poorly. The experiments support measuring global agreement and local structure separately, rather than inferring consensus from uniform local agreement.
cs.MA