Diverse Evidence, Better Forecasts: Multi-Agent Deliberation Under Information Asymmetry

Multi-agent systems are increasingly used for forecasting future events, as deliberation among multiple LLMs is believed to improve reasoning and calibration. Yet existing approaches overlook a critical design choice: what information each agent receives. When all agents are given identical evidence, deliberation collapses into herding rather than genuine belief revision, leaving multi-agent systems little better than a single agent. We identify this as a fundamental gap and propose designed information asymmetry to close it: by partitioning evidence into shared public and disjoint private subsets, each agent holds exclusive knowledge that can only reach others through deliberation. We theoretically show that this decomposition reduces inter-agent error correlation, and instantiate it in InfoDelphi, a framework combining relevance-aware evidence routing, rationale-based iterative deliberation, and confidence-weighted aggregation. On PolyGym, a benchmark of 375 binary forecasting questions derived from real-world prediction markets, InfoDelphi outperforms the strongest single-agent and multi-agent baselines by 12--18% in Brier score and 4--8 percentage points in accuracy. More detailed experiments confirm that removing information asymmetry eliminates most deliberation gains, establishing diversity of input as the key enabler of effective multi-agent reasoning.

Don't Blindly Trust It: How Unreliable Feedback Breaks Tool-Using LLM Agents

Tool-augmented agents are typically evaluated by their gains under reliable external feedback. Yet these gains leave open a key counterfactual: when feedback is unreliable, would the agent be better off receiving no task evidence? We study this question with a controlled matched-loop comparison that fixes the agent loop, prompt, action space, and decoding, while varying only the returned observation: faithful, misleading, or absent. Across question answering and fact verification, persistent misleading feedback produces a value inversion: agents that benefit from clean tools can perform worse than the matched no-feedback fallback. On HotpotQA, Qwen2.5-7B reaches 44.8 F1 with clean retrieval and 22.3 F1 with no feedback, but drops to 4.7 F1 under shuffled retrieval. The inversion persists under stronger clean retrieval and locally plausible distractors, but weakens when later clean evidence can repair the trajectory. Early trajectory signals predict many failures, yet simple repairs remain fallback-limited: rejecting bad evidence helps only when the exposed fallback is reliable. These results show that clean-tool gains can overstate tool value, and that matched no-feedback fallback controls are necessary for evaluating tool-augmented agents.

CaveAgent: Transforming LLMs into Stateful Runtime Operators

LLM-based agents are increasingly capable of complex task execution, yet current agentic systems remain constrained by text-centric paradigms. Traditional approaches rely on procedural JSON-based function calling, which often struggles with long-horizon tasks due to fragile multi-turn dependencies and context drift. In this paper, we present CaveAgent, a framework that transforms the paradigm from "LLM-as-Text-Generator" to "LLM-as-Runtime-Operator." We introduce a Dual-stream Context Architecture that decouples state management into a lightweight semantic stream for reasoning and a persistent, deterministic Python Runtime stream for execution. In addition to leveraging code generation to efficiently resolve interdependent sub-tasks (e.g., loops, conditionals) in a single step, we introduce \textit{Stateful Runtime Management} in CaveAgent. Distinct from existing code-based approaches that remain text-bound and lack the support for external object injection and retrieval, CaveAgent injects, manipulates, and retrieves complex Python objects (e.g., DataFrames, database connections) that persist across turns. This persistence mechanism acts as a high-fidelity external memory to eliminate context drift, avoid catastrophic forgetting, while ensuring that processed data flows losslessly to downstream applications. Comprehensive evaluations on Tau$^2$-bench, BFCL and various case studies across representative SOTA LLMs demonstrate CaveAgent's superiority. Specifically, our framework achieves a 10.5\% success rate improvement on retail tasks and reduces total token consumption by 28.4\% in multi-turn scenarios. On data-intensive tasks, direct variable storage and retrieval reduces token consumption by 59\%, allowing CaveAgent to handle large-scale data that causes context overflow failures in both JSON-based and Code-based agents.