{"ID":2862720,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26126","arxiv_id":"2509.26126","title":"The Hunger Game Debate: On the Emergence of Over-Competition in Multi-Agent Systems","abstract":"LLM-based multi-agent systems demonstrate great potential for tackling complex problems, but how competition shapes their behavior remains underexplored. This paper investigates the over-competition in multi-agent debate, where agents under extreme pressure exhibit unreliable, harmful behaviors that undermine both collaboration and task performance. To study this phenomenon, we propose HATE, the Hunger Game Debate, a novel experimental framework that simulates debates under a zero-sum competition arena. Our experiments, conducted across a range of LLMs and tasks, reveal that competitive pressure significantly stimulates over-competition behaviors and degrades task performance, causing discussions to derail. We further explore the impact of environmental feedback by adding variants of judges, indicating that objective, task-focused feedback effectively mitigates the over-competition behaviors. We also probe the post-hoc kindness of LLMs and form a leaderboard to characterize top LLMs, providing insights for understanding and governing the emergent social dynamics of AI community.","short_abstract":"LLM-based multi-agent systems demonstrate great potential for tackling complex problems, but how competition shapes their behavior remains underexplored. This paper investigates the over-competition in multi-agent debate, where agents under extreme pressure exhibit unreliable, harmful behaviors that undermine both coll...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26126","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26126v1","authors":"[\"Xinbei Ma\",\"Ruotian Ma\",\"Xingyu Chen\",\"Zhengliang Shi\",\"Mengru Wang\",\"Jen-tse Huang\",\"Qu Yang\",\"Wenxuan Wang\",\"Fanghua Ye\",\"Qingxuan Jiang\",\"Mengfei Zhou\",\"Zhuosheng Zhang\",\"Rui Wang\",\"Hai Zhao\",\"Zhaopeng Tu\",\"Xiaolong Li\",\"Linus\"]","published":"2025-09-30T11:44:47Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\"]","has_code":false}