Conformity, Confabulation, and Impersonation: Persona Inconstancy in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration

Razan Baltaji, Babak Hemmatian, Lav Varshney


Abstract
This study explores the sources of instability in maintaining cultural personas and opinions within multi-agent LLM systems. Drawing on simulations of inter-cultural collaboration and debate, we analyze agents’ pre- and post-discussion private responses alongside chat transcripts to assess the stability of cultural personas and the impact of opinion diversity on group outcomes. Our findings suggest that multi-agent discussions can encourage collective decisions that reflect diverse perspectives, yet this benefit is tempered by the agents’ susceptibility to conformity due to perceived peer pressure and challenges in maintaining consistent personas and opinions. Counterintuitively, instructions that encourage debate in support of one’s opinions increase the rate of instability. Without addressing the factors we identify, the full potential of multi-agent frameworks for producing more culturally diverse AI outputs will remain untapped.
Anthology ID:
2024.c3nlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Sunipa Dev, Luciana Benotti, Daniel Hershcovich, Laura Cabello, Yong Cao, Ife Adebara, Li Zhou
Venues:
C3NLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.c3nlp-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.c3nlp-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Razan Baltaji, Babak Hemmatian, and Lav Varshney. 2024. Conformity, Confabulation, and Impersonation: Persona Inconstancy in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP, pages 17–31, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conformity, Confabulation, and Impersonation: Persona Inconstancy in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration (Baltaji et al., C3NLP-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.c3nlp-1.2.pdf