More Rounds, More Noise: Why Multi-Turn Review Fails to Improve Cross-Context Verification

TL;DR

Multi-turn cross-context review for LLM verification introduces more noise and false positives, reducing overall accuracy compared to single-pass review, due to false positive pressure and conversation drift.

Contribution

This paper demonstrates that multi-turn review strategies do not improve, and can worsen, LLM verification performance compared to single-pass methods, highlighting the challenges of iterative review.

Findings

Single-pass CCR outperforms multi-turn variants in F1 score.

Multi-turn review increases false positives and reduces precision.

Re-review without prior context performs worst, indicating repetition harms accuracy.

Abstract

Cross-Context Review (CCR) improves LLM verification by separating production and review into independent sessions. A natural extension is multi-turn review: letting the reviewer ask follow-up questions, receive author responses, and review again. We call this Dynamic Cross-Context Review (D-CCR). In a controlled experiment with 30 artifacts and 150 injected errors, we tested four D-CCR variants against the single-pass CCR baseline. Single-pass CCR (F1 = 0.376) significantly outperformed all multi-turn variants, including D-CCR-2b with question-and-answer exchange (F1 = 0.303, $p < 0.001$, $d = -0.59$). Multi-turn review increased recall (+0.08) but generated 62% more false positives (8.5 vs. 5.2), collapsing precision from 0.30 to 0.20. Two mechanisms drive this degradation: (1) false positive pressure -- reviewers in later rounds fabricate findings when the artifact's real errors have been exhausted, and (2) Review Target Drift -- reviewers provided with prior Q&A exchanges shift from reviewing the artifact to critiquing the conversation itself. Independent re-review without prior context (D-CCR-2c) performed worst (F1 = 0.263), confirming that mere repetition degrades rather than helps. The degradation stems from false positive pressure in additional rounds, not from information amount -- within multi-turn conditions, more information actually helps (D-CCR-2b > D-CCR-2a). The problem is not what the reviewer sees, but that reviewing again invites noise.