Abstract Structured multi-agent debates among Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing reasoning reliability and argumentative coherence. Motivated by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) interest in trustworthy AI for space operations, this study proposes a moderated, domain-adaptive multi-agent debate framework applied to the high-stakes domain of satellite communications (SatCom). Specifically, it assesses (i) the efficacy of structured deliberation against single-agent baselines, and (ii) the impact of model heterogeneity versus homogeneity. A single-agent baseline is compared against a multi-agent framework deploying a moderator and two domain-specialized experts. These systems utilize local 70B-parameter LLMs in homogeneous (Llama-3.3) and heterogeneous (Llama-3.3 + DeepSeek-R1 + Qwen-2.5) configurations, all augmented with a shared, curated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) corpus combining academic institutional sources and ESA material from the Nebula portal (SatNex V programme). Outputs from 213 technical queries are evaluated via LLM-as-a-judge across three phases: baseline proficiency, strategic reasoning, and executive readiness. Single-agent systems lead in encyclopedic tasks, where retrieval suffices over deliberation. However, both multi-agent configurations outperform in strategic reasoning, with heterogeneous debates achieving superior performance in executive scenarios by victory margins of up to 2.75 points on a 10-point scale. These results validate architectural diversity as a decisive factor in resolving high-complexity technical conflicts. Ultimately, this work delivers a generalizable, fully traceable deliberation framework suitable for real-world, mission-critical environments. Code, prompts, and evaluation data are publicly available at https://github.com/amozo-es/multi-agent-debate/ .
Álvarez et al. (2026) studied this question.