Same Contacts, Different Rooms:Meeting Format Shapes LLM Group Influence Beyond Pairwise Contact Counts

Zhexi Gu, Shusheng Cao, Runping Zhu

Simulations of LLM agent collectives usually summarise interaction as a pairwise contact network. We test that summary with a contact-matched intervention: the members, their initial stances and every pairwise contact count stay fixed while the meetings are reorganised, and each member gives a one-step support readout after reading the arguments of everyone present. Across six open-weight LLMs and 14 debate topics, merging triads into five-person meetings (resize) moves group support more than reshuffling who meets in triads (regroup), although both move the same 60 dyadic exposures. The root-mean-square change is 4.36 versus 2.59 percentage points (pp), larger for resize in all six models and in 81 of 84 model-topic cells. Resizing also has a consistent direction: it amplifies the initial majority of the merged members by 1.72 pp, in every model, whereas regrouping has no direction (<= 0.03 pp). A contact network cannot represent regrouping at all, yet pairwise rules applied meeting by meeting explain up to 76% of its effect, and with identical weights they raise resize R^2 by 0.51-0.58 for two models. We show that the gap between the two placements is an exact Jensen gap of the…