CuriousTogether: Implications of Curiosity and Cultural Grounding in Multi-Agent LLM Interactions
Angana Borah, Zoha Hayat Bhatti, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings, exhibiting emergent collective behaviors, yet the role of curiosity as a driver of such dynamics remains understudied. We introduce CuriousTogether, a framework evaluating curiosity-driven multi-agent LLM interactions across three complementary dimensions: novelty-seeking, epistemic and social curiosity. Across eight tasks spanning reasoning, creative generation, and social bias mitigation, curiosity-guided multi-agent settings yield improvements over non-curious ones on seven out of eight tasks, with gains of up to 20.6% in story generation (semantic diversity) and a 14.9 pp reduction in stereotype rates. Furthermore, country-conditioned cultural grounding show benefits for story generation and social tasks, but can hurt precision-oriented reasoning. Finally, we show that inference-time multi-agent curiosity-based approach offers favorable quality-token trade-offs, compared with single-agent baselines. Together, these findings support curiosity-guided interaction as a practical mechanism for improving multi-agent collaboration, with downstream benefits for reasoning, creative, and societal tasks.