More Agents Improve Math Problem Solving but Adversarial Robustness Gap Persists

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Authors: Khashayar Alavi, Zhastay Yeltay, Lucie Flek, Akbar Karimi
Cited by: 0

Abstract

When LLM agents work together, they seem to be more powerful than a single LLM in mathematical question answering.However, are they also more robust to adversarial inputs?We investigate this question using adversarially perturbed math questions.These perturbations include punctuation noise with three intensities (10%, 30%, 50%), plus real-world and human-like typos (WikiTypo, R 2 ATA).Using a unified sampling-and-voting framework (Agent Forest), we evaluate six opensource models (Qwen3-4B/14B, Llama3.1-8B,Mistral-7B, Gemma3-4B/12B) across four benchmarks (GSM8K, MATH, MMLU-Math, MultiArith), with various numbers of agents n ∈ {1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25}.Our findings show that 1) Noise type matters: punctuation noise harm scales with its severity, and the human typos remain the dominant bottleneck, yielding the largest gaps to Clean accuracy and the highest attack success rate (ASR) even with a large number of agents; 2) Collaboration reliably improves accuracy as the number of agents, n, increases, with the largest gains from n=1 to n=5 and diminishing returns beyond n≈10.However, the adversarial robustness gap persists regardless of the agent count.Code is available on GitHub 1 . * Equal contribution

Fields of Study & Subjects

Topic Modeling Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning Multimodal Machine Learning Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
43457–43475
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN