<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="feng-etal-2026-pear">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>PEAR: Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Yang</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Feng</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Ziwei</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Xu</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Xia</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Hu</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Fengxiang</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">He</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-459-0</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Multi-agent debate improves the reliability of large language models (LLMs) through iterative peer critiques. However, fixed topologies often introduce persistent positional biases, amplify unreliable agents, and cause high sensitivity to role assignments. We introduce Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate (PEAR), an inference-time protocol that dynamically reconfigures communication roles and sparse topologies across consecutive debate rounds. By strategically switching agent-to-role assignments based on evolving agent states, PEAR prevents any agent from permanently occupying a privileged network position or distributes influence more evenly across the debate. We theoretically characterize PEAR as an equivariant sparse router: it preserves accuracy under agent relabeling while reducing routing complexity and improving generalization. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across four reasoning benchmarks and six diverse LLM backbones demonstrate PEAR significantly improves average accuracy over the strongest debate baselines. The code is at https://github.com/EVIEHub/PEAR.</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">feng-etal-2026-pear</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2114/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-10</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>48076</start>
            <end>48103</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T PEAR: Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate
%A Feng, Yang
%A Xu, Ziwei
%A Hu, Xia
%A He, Fengxiang
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F feng-etal-2026-pear
%X Multi-agent debate improves the reliability of large language models (LLMs) through iterative peer critiques. However, fixed topologies often introduce persistent positional biases, amplify unreliable agents, and cause high sensitivity to role assignments. We introduce Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate (PEAR), an inference-time protocol that dynamically reconfigures communication roles and sparse topologies across consecutive debate rounds. By strategically switching agent-to-role assignments based on evolving agent states, PEAR prevents any agent from permanently occupying a privileged network position or distributes influence more evenly across the debate. We theoretically characterize PEAR as an equivariant sparse router: it preserves accuracy under agent relabeling while reducing routing complexity and improving generalization. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across four reasoning benchmarks and six diverse LLM backbones demonstrate PEAR significantly improves average accuracy over the strongest debate baselines. The code is at https://github.com/EVIEHub/PEAR.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2114/
%P 48076-48103

Markdown (Informal)

[PEAR: Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2114/) (Feng et al., EMNLP 2026)

• PEAR: Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate (Feng et al., EMNLP 2026)

ACL

• Yang Feng, Ziwei Xu, Xia Hu, and Fengxiang He. 2026. PEAR: Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 48076–48103, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.