What Does Multi-Agent LLM Debate Actually Change? A Layered Analysis of Disagreement and Answer Quality

Abstract

Multi-agent debate, in which several LLMs exchange arguments before producing an answer, is widely assumed to improve answer quality by surfacing genuine disagreement. That disagreement is hard to verify, and no single signal can settle it, so we organize the analysis around four questions: (A) does the debater say it disagrees; (B) does its reply text actually argue; (C) does the dissent survive once the tone instruction that produced it is removed; and (D) do the probabilities assigned to stance options change? We evaluate three-model committees on 50 open-ended GlobalOpinionQA questions under three debate tones, friendly (seek common ground), neutral, and hostile (stress-test every position). The answers differ. (A) Full agreement differs by 50.4 percentage points between the friendly and hostile endpoints, pooling replies across all three rounds. (B) The text argues too: an LLM evaluator reading the contribution and reply without the structured self-report or tone instruction confirms the pushback is real. (C) Removing the instruction produces more returns to agreement in our sample, but the primary question-level test is inconclusive. (D) In a separate open-weight study, adjusted movement toward the opposing side is detected in two of three models, relative to a filler-based reference. This measures contextual response probabilities, not lasting belief change. For final answers, debate brings no measurable quality gain: an evaluator that judges each pair in both answer orders scores the debated answer no better than the same committee's no-debate answer on all 299 pairs, a test that detects severe but misses moderate damage in our checks. Taken together, LLM debate readily changes what agents say, but we find much weaker evidence that it changes what they persistently endorse or improves the quality of the final answer.