When Does Delegation Beat Majority? A Delegation-Based Aggregator for Multi-Sample LLM Inference

Title:When Does Delegation Beat Majority? A Delegation-Based Aggregator for Multi-Sample LLM Inference

Abstract:Majority voting over sampled answers is the dominant unsupervised aggregator for multi-sample LLM inference. In this paper, we show a delegation-based aggregator (Propagational Proxy Voting, PPV; Sakai et al., 2025) yields an unsupervised consensus rule that beats majority on MMLU-Pro by +1.5 pp overall and +2.24 pp on the non-trivial subset (paired McNemar p ~ 1.0e-14, n = 8,099). Majority discards two signals that every sample carries: within-group letter entropy and between-group reasoning geometry. PPV exposes per-voter levers that consume exactly these two signals: When (how much weight a voter keeps on its own pick) and Whom (how it splits the remainder across peers). We drive When with letter entropy and Whom with per-question-centered embedding cosine. Our method needs no gold labels and no auxiliary training: per-question, we partition 128 sampled generations into 16 groups, compute each group's letter-level semantic entropy and reasoning embedding centroid, and feed both into a stochastic delegation matrix whose stationary distribution selects the consensus answer. We walk through an example in which PPV overturns a clear 10-6 majority for the wrong letter: the 10-voter majority cluster is geometrically incoherent (mean within-cluster cosine -0.02) while the 6-voter minority is tight (+0.26), so propagated delegation mass concentrates on the minority's answer even though entropy alone would keep the majority ahead. We further report delegation strategies with negative results that constrain the design space for unsupervised LLM aggregation. No within-question ensemble of confidence modes closes the oracle gap.

Preprint. 16 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2606.08098 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2606.08098v2 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.08098 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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