Council Mode: A Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Consensus Framework for Reducing LLM Hallucination and Bias
About
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced capabilities but often suffer from factual inaccuracies (hallucinations) and systematic biases. These issues, sometimes amplified in specific architectures like Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) which motivate our work, pose risks for reliable deployment. To address these challenges, we propose the Council Mode, a multi-agent consensus framework. Our approach dispatches queries to multiple heterogeneous frontier LLMs in parallel and synthesizes their outputs using a dedicated consensus model. The pipeline consists of three phases: an intelligent triage for query complexity, parallel generation across diverse models, and a structured synthesis that identifies agreement, disagreement, and unique findings. In our evaluation, conducted under controlled no-web settings, the Council Mode achieved a 41.7% relative reduction in hallucination rates on a 1,200-sample HaluEval subset and a 7.5-point improvement on TruthfulQA compared to the top-performing individual model. On our curated MDR-500 multi-domain reasoning benchmark, the Council Mode achieved a Quality Score of 95.4%, representing a 9.2-point improvement over the best individual model. The framework also exhibited lower measured bias variance under our rubric-based evaluation protocol. We provide a cost-effectiveness analysis showing that the framework incurs a 4.2x token-cost overhead, making it most suitable for accuracy-prioritized applications where the cost of errors exceeds the added inference cost. These findings suggest that structured multi-agent consensus is a promising direction for enhancing the reliability and factual grounding of LLM-generated content.