@inproceedings{zeng-etal-2025-s2,
title = "S$^2$-{MAD}: Breaking the Token Barrier to Enhance Multi-Agent Debate Efficiency",
author = "Zeng, Yuting and
Huang, Weizhe and
Jiang, Lei and
Liu, Tongxuan and
Jin, XiTai and
Tiana, Chen Tianying and
Li, Jing and
Xu, Xiaohua",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.475/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.475",
pages = "9393--9408",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) scenarios, but they still face challenges when handling complex arithmetic and logical reasoning tasks. While Chain-Of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, self-consistency (SC) and self-correction strategies have attempted to guide models in sequential, multi-step reasoning, Multi-agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a viable approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By increasing both the number of agents and the frequency of debates, the performance of LLMs improves significantly. However, this strategy results in a significant increase in token costs, presenting a barrier to scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel sparsification strategy designed to reduce token costs within MAD. This approach minimizes ineffective exchanges of information and unproductive discussions among agents, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of the debate process. We conduct comparative experiments on multiple datasets across various models, demonstrating that our approach significantly reduces the token costs in MAD to a considerable extent. Specifically, compared to MAD, our approach achieves an impressive reduction of up to 94.5{\%} in token costs while maintaining performance degradation below 2.0{\%}."
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<abstract>Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) scenarios, but they still face challenges when handling complex arithmetic and logical reasoning tasks. While Chain-Of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, self-consistency (SC) and self-correction strategies have attempted to guide models in sequential, multi-step reasoning, Multi-agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a viable approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By increasing both the number of agents and the frequency of debates, the performance of LLMs improves significantly. However, this strategy results in a significant increase in token costs, presenting a barrier to scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel sparsification strategy designed to reduce token costs within MAD. This approach minimizes ineffective exchanges of information and unproductive discussions among agents, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of the debate process. We conduct comparative experiments on multiple datasets across various models, demonstrating that our approach significantly reduces the token costs in MAD to a considerable extent. Specifically, compared to MAD, our approach achieves an impressive reduction of up to 94.5% in token costs while maintaining performance degradation below 2.0%.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T S²-MAD: Breaking the Token Barrier to Enhance Multi-Agent Debate Efficiency
%A Zeng, Yuting
%A Huang, Weizhe
%A Jiang, Lei
%A Liu, Tongxuan
%A Jin, XiTai
%A Tiana, Chen Tianying
%A Li, Jing
%A Xu, Xiaohua
%Y Chiruzzo, Luis
%Y Ritter, Alan
%Y Wang, Lu
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 April
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Albuquerque, New Mexico
%@ 979-8-89176-189-6
%F zeng-etal-2025-s2
%X Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) scenarios, but they still face challenges when handling complex arithmetic and logical reasoning tasks. While Chain-Of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, self-consistency (SC) and self-correction strategies have attempted to guide models in sequential, multi-step reasoning, Multi-agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a viable approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By increasing both the number of agents and the frequency of debates, the performance of LLMs improves significantly. However, this strategy results in a significant increase in token costs, presenting a barrier to scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel sparsification strategy designed to reduce token costs within MAD. This approach minimizes ineffective exchanges of information and unproductive discussions among agents, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of the debate process. We conduct comparative experiments on multiple datasets across various models, demonstrating that our approach significantly reduces the token costs in MAD to a considerable extent. Specifically, compared to MAD, our approach achieves an impressive reduction of up to 94.5% in token costs while maintaining performance degradation below 2.0%.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.475
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.475/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.475
%P 9393-9408
Markdown (Informal)
[S2-MAD: Breaking the Token Barrier to Enhance Multi-Agent Debate Efficiency](https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.475/) (Zeng et al., NAACL 2025)
ACL
- Yuting Zeng, Weizhe Huang, Lei Jiang, Tongxuan Liu, XiTai Jin, Chen Tianying Tiana, Jing Li, and Xiaohua Xu. 2025. S2-MAD: Breaking the Token Barrier to Enhance Multi-Agent Debate Efficiency. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9393–9408, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.