When Does Delegation Beat Majority? A Delegation-Based Aggregator for Multi-Sample LLM Inference

Majority voting over sampled answers is the dominant unsupervised aggregator for multi-sample LLM inference. We show that piping the signals every sample carries into a delegation-based aggregator (Propagational Proxy Voting, PPV) yields an unsupervised consensus rule that beats majority on MMLU-Pro by +1.5 pp overall and +2.24 pp on the non-trivial subset (paired McNemar p ~ 1.0e-14, n = 8,099). Majority discards two free signals every sample carries: within-group letter entropy and between-group reasoning geometry. PPV exposes two per-voter levers that consume exactly these signals: WHEN (how much weight a voter keeps on its own pick) and WHOM (how it splits the remainder across peers). We drive WHEN with letter entropy and WHOM with per-question-centered embedding cosine. The method needs no gold labels and no auxiliary training: per question, we partition 128 sampled generations into 16 groups, compute each group's letter-level semantic entropy and reasoning embedding centroid, and feed both into a stochastic delegation matrix whose stationary distribution selects the consensus answer. We walk through an example in which PPV overturns a clear 10-6 majority for the wrong letter: the 10-voter majority cluster is geometrically incoherent (mean within-cluster cosine -0.02) while the 6-voter minority is tight (+0.26), so propagated delegation mass concentrates on the minority's answer even though entropy alone would keep the majority ahead. We further report delegation strategies with negative results that constrain the design space for unsupervised LLM aggregation: no within-question ensemble of confidence modes closes the oracle gap.

Do Robots Need Body Language? Comparing Communication Modalities for Legible Motion Intent in Human-Shared Spaces

Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as expressive, intentionally or not, making it important to understand how such cues are perceived. We present an online video study evaluating how different signaling modalities, expressive motion, lights, text, and audio, shape people's ability to understand a quadruped robot's upcoming navigation actions (Boston Dynamics Spot). Across four common scenarios, we measure how each modality influences humans' (1) accuracy in predicting the robot's next navigation action, (2) confidence in that prediction, and (3) trust in the robot to act safely. The study tests how expressive motions compare to explicit channels, whether aligned multimodal cues enhance interpretability, and how conflicting cues affect user confidence and trust. We contribute initial evidence on the relative effectiveness of implicit versus explicit signaling strategies.