错误但有用:多智能体消息中超越答案正确性的轨迹价值

Wrong but Useful: Trajectory Value Beyond Answer Correctness in Multi-Agent Messages

精选理由

这篇论文给多智能体提了个醒:答错的消息也可能有用。用DHD协议能找出该留该扔的消息,比单看答案正确率更靠谱。

AI 摘要

论文提出DHD协议,通过缓存五条独立生成的消息并回放给下游集成器,测量每条消息的轨迹价值。在五个数学与科学基准上,使用gpt-oss-120b和gemma-4-31B-it两个模型系列,错误但有用的消息出现在每个模型-基准组合中。在改变最终正确性的错误消息里,超过四成是有帮助的。重复实验显示这种效果不太可能来自回放随机波动(p=0.0002)。论文还发现,保留完整错误消息比只保留其推理或答案更有效,但完整消息优势的来源仍待解释。

原文 · arXiv cs.LG

Wrong but Useful: Trajectory Value Beyond Answer Correctness in Multi-Agent Messages

Multi-agent reasoning systems often use agreement, confidence, or automated scores to decide which messages should shape a final answer. Such filtering assumes that a message likely to be correct is also worth keeping. Yet a wrong answer can contain a useful decomposition, constraint, or scientific principle. We test this distinction with Diverse Hypothesis Deliberation (DHD), a controlled measurement protocol that caches five independently generated messages and replays the same downstream solver, called the integrator, with each message available or hidden. The replay comparison measures a message's trajectory value: whether making the message available helps or harms subsequent reasoning. Across five mathematics and science benchmarks and two openly available model families, gpt-oss-120b and gemma-4-31B-it, wrong-helpful messages appear in every benchmark-model combination. Among wrong-answer messages that change final correctness, more than four in ten changes are helpful in each model. Controlled repeats show that the number of repeatable message effects is unlikely to arise from replay variation alone (p=0.0002). A focused intervention on repeatable wrong-helpful messages finds that the complete message works best, while retaining its reasoning preserves more success than retaining only its answer; the source of the complete-message advantage remains open. Within the same problem, repeated trajectory-value evidence also identifies a better keep-or-remove choice than answer correctness alone. Answer correctness is therefore informative but does not determine trajectory value. DHD measures this missing property and produces reusable labels for learning when agents should listen.