EquiMem: Calibrating Shared Memory in Multi-Agent Debate via Game-Theoretic Equilibrium

Abstract:Multi-agent debate (MAD) systems increasingly rely on shared memory to support long-horizon reasoning, but this convenience opens a critical vulnerability: a single corrupted entry can contaminate the downstream memory-augmented reasoning, and debate alone fails to filter such errors. Existing safeguards filter entries via heuristics or LLM-based validation, yet they rely on AI judgments that share the same failure modes and overlook the cross-agent dynamics of MAD. We address this gap by formulating memory updating in MAD as a zero-trust memory game, in which no agent is assumed reliable and the game's equilibrium motivates a principled objective for calibrating memory influence. Guided by this objective, we propose EquiMem, an inference-time calibration mechanism that evaluates each update against the shared memory state and the memory already being used by other agents, using their existing retrieval queries and traversal paths as evidence of calibration. EquiMem instantiates this calibration for both embedding- and graph-based memory, and across diverse benchmarks, MAD frameworks, and memory architectures, it consistently outperforms existing safeguards, remains robust under adversarial agents, and incurs negligible inference overhead.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2605.09278 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2605.09278v2 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.09278 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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