AI RESEARCH
The Reasoning Trap: An Information-Theoretic Bound on Closed-System Multi-Step LLM Reasoning
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2605.01704v1 Announce Type: new When copies of the same language model are prompted to debate, they produce diverse phrasings of one perspective rather than diverse perspectives. Multi-agent debate (MAD), and broadly closed-system reasoning where agents iteratively transform each other's outputs, tends to preserve answer accuracy while degrading the reasoning behind those answers. We name the multi-agent case the Debate Trap and the broader phenomenon the Reasoning Trap, offering a programmatic theory of evidence-grounded reasoning failure.