More Agents, More Rules: HiMA-MDD Treats Multi-Agent AI as a Governance Problem
TL;DR for operators Dividing a high-stakes decision among specialist agents does not specify who may see which evidence, who owns each subdecision, or who can revise it. HiMA-MDD1 turns those choices into explicit system rules for PHQ-8 assessment from completed multimodal clinical interviews. The strongest architectural signal is not “more agents perform better.” Before global verification, four specialists produce the lowest total-score error, while two specialists produce the highest screening kappa and Macro-F1. Removing cross-factor audit and targeted revision causes the largest screening-performance decline among the paper’s three component ablations. Giving four specialists bounded item-specific evidence also beats giving them a capped shared evidence pool on every reported pre-verification metric, although that experiment changes both evidence composition and context length. ...