Definition
Plain language
Running a model several times on the same question and going with the most common answer.
As stated in the literature
An aggregation strategy that samples multiple completions and selects the modal final answer; effective for short-answer math but degraded by correlated errors and inapplicable to long agentic trajectories.
Also called: majority vote
Why it matters: It's a cheap way to boost accuracy on short answers, but it fails when the model's mistakes tend to repeat together or when answers are long and complex.
For example, asking a model the same math problem five times and going with whichever answer came up most often.
Heard on the show
“The paper measured it: on the AIME-level math stream, five-agent majority voting scored under seven percent, worse than a single agent alone.”Episode 200 — The One Mechanism That Turns Twenty AI Clones Into an Actual Team