COLING 2025main0 citations

PToco: Prefix-based Token-level Collaboration Enhances Reasoning for Multi-LLMs

Yuang Bian, Yupian Lin, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan

Abstract

Collaboration between multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has attracted significant attention for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance reasoning capabilities. Previous approaches, such as multi-agent debate and decoding-time integration, either rely on highly capable models with strong self-reflection abilities or are limited to models sharing the same tokenizer. To address these limitations, we introduce PToco (Prefix-based Token-level Collaboration), a novel mechanism that enables effective collaboration among less capable LLMs, independent of tokenizer differences. PToco uses a prefix-grouping method to extract consensus among tokens with varying levels of granularity, ensuring coherent and robust token generation across multiple models. Experimental results on a series of reasoning tasks demonstrate that PToco significantly improves performance over individual models. Furthermore, this approach generalizes well across different quantities and sizes of participating models, providing a more flexible and efficient solution for multi-LLM ensembles.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{bian-etal-2025-ptoco,
    title = "{PT}oco: Prefix-based Token-level Collaboration Enhances Reasoning for Multi-{LLM}s",
    author = "Bian, Yuang  and
      Lin, Yupian  and
      Liu, Jingping  and
      Ruan, Tong",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Apidianaki, Marianna  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Eugenio, Barbara Di  and
      Schockaert, Steven",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.556/",
    pages = "8326--8335"
}
PToco: Prefix-based Token-level Collaboration Enhances Reasoning for Multi-LLMs · COLING 2025