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[CS.AI] Conformity Mitigations in Large Language Models: A Single Resistance-Receptivity Frontier

Published at: 2026-08-13 22:00 Last updated: 2026-08-14 00:05
#AI #Machine Learning #LLM

Recent advances in language models have enabled collaborative settings where multiple models leverage one another's capabilities, iteratively improving, transforming, and extending each other's outputs. Each agent sees what the others assert before it answers, so peer opinion competes with the model's own parametric knowledge, and a wrong majority can overturn an answer the model would otherwise get right. We measure that displacement in 23 open-weight models, 19 conditions, and three datasets, yielding more than a million graded responses. A unanimous wrong majority reverses 22.8% of a model's correct MMLU answers, 54.8% on GPQA, and 71.0% on SimpleQA, and 84-89% of the reversed answers match the peers' answers. Existing mitigations aim to increase Resistance, the rate at which a model keeps its correct answer under this pressure, which is only half of what a collaborating agent needs. We pair it with Receptivity, the rate at which a model adopts a correct peer answer after initially answering incorrectly. We score six methods on both axes, four drawn from prior work and two of our own. Each gains Resistance only by losing Receptivity, and their means fall on a single Resistance-Receptivity frontier with $R^2$ between 0.80 and 0.90. Reflection, the strongest published method, gains 7.9 points of MMLU Resistance and gives up 15.3 of Receptivity. Reasoning is the one exception. On GPQA and SimpleQA it trades like the rest, but on the MMLU subjects whose answers a model can derive for itself it raises Resistance by 7.2 points and Receptivity by 9.6 at once, the only intervention we find that improves both. Blogger's Review: This paper reveals the conformity mitigation issue in large language models and proposes the concept of a Resistance-Receptivity frontier. The research findings indicate that existing mitigation methods have a trade-off, where increasing Resistance results in a loss of Receptivity, with Reasoning being the only method that can improve both. This discovery provides new insights and directions for language model collaboration and improvement.

Original Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11247

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