Who May Overrule the Agent? Evidence-Gated Authority in LLM Review Institutions
arXiv:2611.05390 (cs.AI) โ Submitted 12 September 2026
Author: Fuad Ali
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)
Abstract
Multi-agent language-model systems often add a reviewer to improve an upstream agent's decision. Yet a reviewer can both repair errors and replace decisions that were already correct. We study this as a problem of institutional jurisdiction: conditional on the same proposal, task information, model, and review output, when is the reviewer authorized to make its recommendation binding?
We compare broad override authority with an evidence gate that permits replacement only after the reviewer produces a mechanically valid record of a binding-constraint violation and a compliant repair. Across two locally run open-weight models, 96 spatial-policy tasks, and a 96-task portfolio-transfer benchmark, the gate sharply reduces corruption of correct proposals while retaining most repairs of violations. The directions of this tradeoff are partly implied by the rule; its magnitude depends on reviewer transitions and upstream proposal states.
A prospective validation then gives the reviewer an explicit choice to retain, replace, or escalate. This eliminates correct-proposal corruption for Qwen, but Mistral still replaces all 48 correct proposals; Qwen also declines every welfare-only repair that Mistral frequently attempts. Thus interface design changes reviewer behavior but is not a model-independent safeguard.
The result is not that restricted review is universally better. It is that reviewer competence, action interface, and binding jurisdiction jointly determine both the correction domain and the corruption surface.
Key Findings
- Institutional jurisdiction framing: The paper reframes reviewer overrides in multi-agent LLM systems as a question of institutional authority rather than purely a model-capability problem.
- Evidence-gated override: Requiring a mechanically valid violation record plus a compliant repair substantially reduces corruption of already-correct proposals while preserving most legitimate repairs.
- Model-dependent behavior: Across Qwen and Mistral, interface design (retain / replace / escalate) alters reviewer behavior but does not yield a model-independent safeguard.
- Joint determinants: Reviewer competence, action interface, and binding jurisdiction together shape both the correction domain and the corruption surface.
Metadata
- Comments: 11 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables. Code, frozen outputs, and reproduction instructions are available via the linked GitHub repository.
- Cite as: arXiv:2611.05390 [cs.AI]
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.05390 (arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite)
- Version: arXiv:2611.05390v1 [cs.AI]
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