AI agents debate more effectively when given personalities and the ability to interrupt

(Press-News.org) In a typical online meeting, humans don't always wait politely for their turn to speak. They interrupt to express strong agreement, stay silent when they are unsure, and let their personalities shape the flow of the discussion. Yet, when Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents are programmed to debate or collaborate, they are usually forced into a rigid, round-robin structure that stifles this natural dynamic.

Researchers from The University of Electro-Communications and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have demonstrated that allowing AI agents to break these rules can actually make them smarter.

Their new study proposes a debate framework where LLM-based agents are freed from fixed speaking orders. Instead, these agents can dynamically decide to speak up, cut someone off, or remain silent based on assigned personality traits and the urgency of the moment. The team found that this human-like flexibility led to higher accuracy on complex tasks compared to standard models.

"Current multi-agent systems often feel artificial because they lack the messy, real-time dynamics of human conversation," the researchers explain. "We wanted to see if giving agents the social cues we take for granted-like the ability to interrupt or the choice to stay quiet-would improve their collective intelligence."

To test this, the team integrated the Big Five personality traits (such as openness or agreeableness) into the agents. Unlike conventional systems where an agent generates a full paragraph before the next one begins, this new framework utilizes sentence-by-sentence processing. This granular approach allows agents to "hear" the conversation in real-time and calculate an "urgency score."

If an agent's urgency score spikes-perhaps because it spots an error or has a critical insight-it can interrupt the current speaker immediately. Conversely, if an agent has nothing valuable to add, it can choose silence, preventing the discussion from being cluttered with redundant information.

The framework was evaluated using the MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) benchmark. The results were clear: the "chaotic" agents outperformed the single-LLM baseline in task accuracy.

Interestingly, the inclusion of personality traits significantly reduced unproductive silence. Because agents acted according to their specific characters-some being more dominant, others more reflective-the group reached consensus more efficiently than a group of generic, rule-bound bots.

This study suggests that the future of AI collaboration lies not in stricter controls, but in mimicking human social dynamics. By allowing agents to navigate the friction of interruptions and the nuance of silence, developers can create systems that are not only more naturalistic but also more effective at problem-solving.

The team plans to further apply this framework to creative and collaborative tasks, aiming to develop richer metrics for understanding how "digital personalities" influence group decisions.

Authors
Akikazu Kimura (The University of Electro-Communications)
Ken Fukuda (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, The University of Electro-Communications)
Yasuyuki Tahara (The University of Electro-Communications)
Yuichi Sei (The University of Electro-Communications)

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