Xinrun Wang

Hangfan Zhang, Zhiyao Cui, Jianhao Chen et al.

Multi-agent debate (MAD) has gained significant attention as a promising line of research to improve the factual accuracy and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Despite its conceptual appeal, current MAD research suffers from critical limitations in evaluation practices, including limited benchmark coverage, weak baseline comparisons, and inconsistent setups. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of 5 representative MAD methods across 9 benchmarks using 4 foundational models. Surprisingly, our findings reveal that MAD often fail to outperform simple single-agent baselines such as Chain-of-Thought and Self-Consistency, even when consuming significantly more inference-time computation. To advance MAD research, we further explore the role of model heterogeneity and find it as a universal antidote to consistently improve current MAD frameworks. Based on our findings, we argue that the field must stop overvaluing MAD in its current form; for true advancement, we must critically rethink evaluation paradigms and actively embrace model heterogeneity as a core design principle.

Chang Yang, Ruiyu Wang, Junzhe Jiang et al.

Reasoning is the fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs). Due to the rapid progress of LLMs, there are two main issues of current benchmarks: i) these benchmarks can be crushed in a short time (less than 1 year), and ii) these benchmarks may be easily hacked. To handle these issues, we propose the ever-scalingness for building the benchmarks which are uncrushable, unhackable, auto-verifiable and general. This paper presents Nondeterministic Polynomial-time Problem Challenge (NPPC), an ever-scaling reasoning benchmark for LLMs. Specifically, the NPPC has three main modules: i) npgym, which provides a unified interface of 25 well-known NP-complete problems and can generate any number of instances with any levels of complexities, ii) npsolver: which provides a unified interface to evaluate the problem instances with both online and offline models via APIs and local deployments, respectively, and iii) npeval: which provides the comprehensive and ready-to-use tools to analyze the performances of LLMs over different problems, the number of tokens, the aha moments, the reasoning errors and the solution errors. Extensive experiments over widely-used LLMs demonstrate: i) NPPC can successfully decrease the performances of advanced LLMs' performances to below 10%, demonstrating that NPPC is uncrushable, ii) DeepSeek-R1, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, and o1/o3-mini are the most powerful LLMs, where DeepSeek-R1 outperforms Claude-3.7-Sonnet and o1/o3-mini in most NP-complete problems considered, and iii) the numbers of tokens, aha moments in the advanced LLMs, e.g., Claude-3.7-Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1, are observed first to increase and then decrease when the problem instances become more and more difficult. We believe that NPPC is the first ever-scaling reasoning benchmark, serving as the uncrushable and unhackable testbed for LLMs toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).