Thinking Fast and Laterally: Multi-Agentic Approach for Reasoning about Uncertain Emerging Events

This paper introduces lateral thinking to implement System-2 reasoning capabilities in AI systems, focusing on anticipatory and causal reasoning under uncertainty. We present a framework for systematic generation and modeling of lateral thinking queries and evaluation datasets. We introduce Streaming agentic Lateral Thinking (SALT), a multi-agent framework designed to process complex, low-specificity queries in streaming data environments. SALT implements lateral thinking-inspired System-2 reasoning through a dynamic communication structure between specialized agents. Preliminary quantitative and qualitative evaluations indicate SALT's potential to outperform single-agent systems in handling complex reasoning tasks.