JURIS: Bringing the Jury System to Multi-Agent Summarization

Abstract

Agents implemented using Large Language Models (LLMs) offer novel solutions for tasks such as document summarization. However, single-agent systems, limited by their own knowledge base, often exhibit information omissions or inconsistencies with the facts, while multi-agent systems lacking effective organization can fall into the trap of social cognitive defects such as flattery and premature consensus. Inspired by the U.S. jury system, we propose JURIS, a judicial-decision-inspired multi-agent collaborative framework. Specifically, the document summarization process simulates a lawsuit scenario: multiple generator agents condense the target text into multiple sentences from different perspectives, much like lawyers on both sides providing different evidence; multiple decision-making agents consider the overall picture based on defense and voting mechanisms to select candidate sentences, much like a jury adopting different evidence; finally, a chief editor agent compiles a summary of all selected sentences, much like a secretary summarizing a plan and a judge giving a final verdict. Extensive experiments on in-domain news and cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate that JURIS consistently and significantly outperforms strong single-agent and multi-agent baselines across automatic evaluation metrics, multi-dimensional quality assessments, and human judgments, validating the effectiveness of decision-driven structured multi-agent collaboration for document summarization.