Today's large language models excel at pattern recall yet falter on long-range planning, self-critique, context loss, and the tendency of maximum-likelihood training to reward popularity over quality. MACI offers a promising route to AGI by orchestrating specialized LLM agents through explicit protocols rather than enlarging a single model. Several modules remedy complementary weaknesses: adversarial-collaborative debate surfaces hidden assumptions; critical-reading rubrics filter incoherent arguments; information-theoretic signals steer dialogue quantitatively; transactional memory enables reliable long-horizon execution; and a dual-agent ethical court adjudicates outputs. Crucially, MACI also modulates linguistic behavior, tuning each agent's contentiousness and emotional tone, so the collective explores ideas from contrasting, affect-aware perspectives before converging.
Fourteen aphorisms distill the framework's philosophy, including:
- Intelligence emerges from regulated collaboration, not isolated brilliance
- Exploration must remain in tension with exploitation
Across healthcare diagnosis, investment support, scheduling, supply-chain management, and news-bias mitigation, MACI ensembles deliver significant improvements in reasoning depth, planning horizon, and reliability compared with similar-sized single models. By uniting structured debate, information-theoretic coordination, persistent memory, affect-aware discourse, and deliberative ethics, MACI demonstrates that rigorously validated multi-agent collaboration provides a practical, interpretable path toward robust general intelligence.
By:
Edward Y Chang Imprint: Association for Computing Machinery Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 191mm,
Spine: 33mm
Weight: 1.234kg ISBN:9798400731976 Series:ACM Books Pages: 598 Publication Date:12 January 2026 Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: Active