Self-Consistency

Sample multiple independent reasoning paths and select the most consistent answer.

Self-consistency improves reliability by generating multiple independent reasoning traces and selecting the most frequent final answer (majority vote).

Why It Matters for Agents

Agents make many brittle decisions (tool choice, parameter selection, final outputs). Self-consistency is a simple reliability layer that pairs well with evaluator loops.

Trade-offs

  • Higher reliability on some tasks.
  • Increased latency and cost (multiple samples).

Further Reading