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Internalizing Self-Consistency in LMs: Multi-Agent Consensus Alignment (arxiv.org)
2 points by simonpure on Sep 19, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A model is trained on transcripts of several copies of itself arguing over answers, learning to prefer the reasoning most copies agree on. This beats simply picking the most common answer, raising solo math accuracy by 21.5%.

Abstract · Self-Improvement of Language Models by Post-Training on Multi-Agent Debate

Self-improvement, where models improve beyond their current performance without external supervision, remains a challenge. The core difficulty is sourcing a training signal stronger than what the model itself can currently produce. Majority voting has been shown to provide such a signal by aggregating over multiple samples, helping mitigate some of the inconsistencies in LM reasoning. In this work, we show that multi-agent debate--where models collaborate and exchange reasoning over multiple rounds--provides an even richer signal than single-round majority voting. We introduce Multi-Agent Consensus Alignment (MACA), which uses reinforcement learning (RL) to post-train models to effectively utilize multi-agent debate. We find that preference learning over full reasoning traces, learning to differentiate between majority and minority reasoning, is more effective than binary consensus rewards or SFT-based approaches for leveraging these debate signals. This produces three key improvements: models are (1) better at utilizing the multi-agent debate setting (+26.87% on MATH), (2) individually more accurate (+21.51% on MathQA), and (3) more self-consistent (+27.6% on GSM8K). We also see strong generalization to unseen benchmarks (+16.3% on GPQA, +11.6% on CommonsenseQA).

Ankur Samanta, Akshayaa Magesh, Runzhe Wu, Ayush Jain, Youliang Yu, Daniel Jiang, Boris Vidolov, Paul Sajda, Yonathan Efroni, Kaveh Hassani
arXiv:2509.15172 · cs.AI · submitted Sep 18, 2025 · updated Jan 29, 2026
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