Can LLM Teams Play What? Where? When?

Anastasia Kotelnikova; Viktor Byzov; Maria Dolzhenkova; Evgeny Kotelnikov

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arXiv · 2605.30459

Can LLM Teams Play What? Where? When?

Anastasia Kotelnikova·Viktor Byzov·Maria Dolzhenkova·Evgeny Kotelnikov

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Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) remain limited on tasks requiring indirect reasoning, cultural knowledge, and coordinated hypothesis testing. We investigate whether team-based interaction improves LLM performance in What? Where? When? (ChGK), a quiz game designed to reward collective reasoning. We introduce three team strategies: Voting, Silent Team (the captain observes final answers), and Talkative Team (the captain observes both answers and rationales). To minimize data leakage, we evaluate these strategies on a dataset consisting of 572 ChGK questions released in 2025. Using six recent large-scale open models, we show that team-based strategies outperform single-model baselines, yielding gains of up to 20 percentage points in accuracy. The best team achieves 44.23% accuracy, and approaches human team performance on questions with available human statistics. Analysis of inter-model diversity reveals that disagreement strongly predicts lower accuracy, but explanatory communication substantially mitigates performance drops. We further examine captain behavior and find no evidence of self-preference bias; access to peer rationales improves captain judgments. Overall, LLM teams function primarily as answer selection and error-filtering mechanisms rather than generators of novel solutions. Our findings highlight the importance of interaction and suggest adaptive strategies as a promising direction for multi-agent systems.

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Anastasia Kotelnikova, Viktor Byzov, Maria Dolzhenkova, Evgeny Kotelnikov. 2026-05-28. Can LLM Teams Play What? Where? When?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30459

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