Upon the Certified Regulation of Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems Possessed of Unshared Evidence

Where the evidence pertinent to a decision lies dispersed among several agents, deliberation constitutes the sole instrument by which it may be consolidated; yet deliberation is customarily left unregulated. Fixed schedules, round-robin exchange and unconstrained debate afford no assurance whatsoever that a given conversational act is the one warranted by the circumstances, and assemblies of language models, in the manner of human committees, are disposed to rehearse what is already held in common and to acquiesce prematurely in a plausible error. We advance We advance QUORUM (Quantified Uncertainty and Oversight of Regret for Unshared-evidence Multi-agent deliberation), an inference-time framework which regulates deliberation rather than merely countenancing it. At each round the framework reduces the proceedings to a compact state comprising uncertainty, dissent, redundancy, evidential gain and premature concurrence; thereupon it determines both the intervention warranted and the agent most fittingly charged with its execution. Each proposal must thereafter withstand a round-wise conformal examination, which circumscribes its one-step regret under a distribution-free, finite-sample assurance and substitutes a certified alternative wherever the proposal is adjudged inadmissible. Regulated deliberation surpasses its unregulated counterpart throughout twelve models and two benchmarks, and not infrequently surpasses the condition wherein every agent is furnished with the entirety of the evidence.