Communicative Dehallucination
When an agent would have to invent missing context to comply with an instruction, flip the direction — have it ask the instructor for the missing detail before answering.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
When an instructed agent would have to invent missing context to comply, have it reverse roles and ask the instructor for the missing detail before answering.
📋 Context
Two agents are communicating in an instructor-and-assistant shape — an orchestrator telling a coding sub-agent what to do, a planner handing work to an executor. The instruction arrives with a decisive detail missing: a specific class name, an API version, an ambiguous unit of measure, or which of several plausible interpretations the instructor actually meant.
💡 Solution
Define an explicit role-reversal protocol: when the assistant detects that the instruction is missing a deciding piece of context, it pivots and emits a focused question back to the instructor. The instructor answers, and only then does the assistant produce its output. Bound the depth (one or two reversals) to prevent infinite back-and-forth.
Real-world Use Case
- Multi-agent setups where the assistant would otherwise fabricate missing context to comply with instructions.
- A reverse-direction question channel between agents can be implemented cleanly.
- Fabrications would propagate downstream and be hard to detect at the artifact boundary.
Source
📌 TL;DR
When an agent is about to hallucinate a missing detail, have it ask instead — one focused question beats a confident wrong answer every time.
Advantages
- Targets the specific hallucination point before it happens, not after.
- Cheaper than full multi-agent debate — the question is tightly scoped.
- Produces a more faithful artifact at the next hand-off.
Disadvantages
- Adds latency for every clarification round.
- Detecting the gap is itself a model judgment that can fail.
- Risk of infinite ping-pong without a strict depth bound.