Hallucination Cascade: Analyzing Error Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
About
Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent text but remain vulnerable to hallucinations, producing unsupported, inconsistent, and factually incorrect claims. Most prior work treats hallucination as a static property of isolated outputs. In multi-agent LLM systems, however, responses are exchanged across agents, revised through sequential stages, and reused as context for later reasoning. Hallucination, therefore, becomes a dynamic process shaped by interaction history, cascade depth, and model heterogeneity. This paper analyzes hallucination dynamics in multi-agent LLM cascades by tracking claim-level factual inconsistencies across sequential agent interactions. We conduct 500 cascade experiments across 10 knowledge domains using GPT-5.3, DeepSeek-V3, and LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct, yielding 1,250 evaluated responses. Results show that deeper cascades reduce the normalized hallucination score from 0.422 at the first agent to 0.272 at the final agent in 3-agent chains, with an amplification factor of 0.644, indicating net attenuation. This reduction is accompanied by a decline in factual accuracy from 0.789 to 0.769, revealing a trade-off between hallucination suppression and factual preservation. Transition-level analysis shows that each agent-to-agent refinement reduces hallucination by an average of 0.072, with small but consistent losses in factual consistency and response quality. Model-level results reveal reliability-efficiency trade-offs: LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct achieves the lowest hallucination score, whereas GPT-5.3 provides faster generation with a higher hallucination rate. Domain-level analysis shows that hallucination varies with topic complexity, with lower scores in well-grounded scientific domains and higher scores in more abstract domains.