Jiahuan Pei, Fanghua Ye, Xin Sun, Wentao Deng, Koen Hindriks, Junxiao Wang. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025. 2025.

A multi-agent system (MAS) enhances its capacity to solve complex natural language processing (NLP) tasks through collaboration among multiple agents, where consensus-seeking serves as a fundamental mechanism. However, existing consensus-seeking approaches typically rely on voting mechanisms to judge consensus, overlooking contradictions in system-internal beliefs that destabilize the consensus. Moreover, these methods often involve agents updating their results through indiscriminate collaboration with every other agent. Such uniform interaction fails to identify the optimal collaborators for each agent, hindering the emergence of a stable consensus. To address these challenges, we provide a theoretical framework for selecting optimal collaborators that maximize consensus stability. Based on the theorems, we propose the Belief-Calibrated Consensus Seeking (BCCS) framework to facilitate stable consensus via selecting optimal collaborators and calibrating the consensus judgment by system-internal beliefs. Experimental results on the MATH and MMLU benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed BCCS framework outperforms the best existing results by 2.23% and 3.95% of accuracy on challenging tasks, respectively. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/dengwentao99/BCCS.

Legal judgment prediction offers a compelling method to aid legal practitioners and researchers. However, the research question remains relatively under-explored: Should multiple defendants and charges be treated separately in LJP? To address this, we introduce a new dataset namely multi-person multi-charge prediction (MPMCP), and seek the answer by evaluating the performance of several prevailing legal large language models (LLMs) on four practical legal judgment scenarios: (S1) single defendant with a single charge, (S2) single defendant with multiple charges, (S3) multiple defendants with a single charge, and (S4) multiple defendants with multiple charges. We evaluate the dataset across two LJP tasks, i.e., charge prediction and penalty term prediction. We have conducted extensive experiments and found that the scenario involving multiple defendants and multiple charges (S4) poses the greatest challenges, followed by S2, S3, and S1. The impact varies significantly depending on the model. For example, in S4 compared to S1, InternLM2 achieves approximately 4.5% lower F1-score and 2.8% higher LogD, while Lawformer demonstrates around 19.7% lower F1-score and 19.0% higher LogD. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lololo-xiao/MultiJustice-MPMCP.