Does Multi-Agent Collaboration Reduce Hallucination in Clinical Tasks?
TL;DR
It is reported that collaboration buys task performance but not lower hallucination as a rule, and no topology is reliably better than another; it is found that collaboration redistributes what its models can already do; it does not supply what they cannot.
Abstract
Multi-agent LLM systems improve performance on clinical tasks, and that improvement is often read as evidence of a more trustworthy system. However, the two are not the same claim. A clinician acts on the stated reasoning and not only on the conclusion, so whether collaboration reduces hallucination, and what decides when it does, has to be measured in the reasoning too. Yet most evaluations score only the final answer. We evaluate four systems (a single-LLM baseline and three multi-agent topologies) across four models and three clinical tasks, scoring hallucination, under a factuality and faithfulness taxonomy, inside the rationale each system generates and reporting it alongside the task metric. We report that collaboration buys task performance but not lower hallucination as a rule, and no topology is reliably better than another. The effect differs by model: of the $36$ model--system--task comparisons, $12$ are large enough to resolve --- four decreases and eight increases, with no model on both sides. What sets the level, and the direction of any change, is the model rather than the topology or the number of agents. A self-correction experiment is consistent with this: shown its own flagged errors, every model except Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct reduces hallucination; the one model for which collaboration lowers hallucination gains the most, and Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, the model whose hallucination it amplifies most, does not reduce its hallucination at all. We find that collaboration redistributes what its models can already do; it does not supply what they cannot.
