The paper examines how Preference Inference (PI) models used in large-scale participatory democracy platforms can alter the perceived consensus and minority support by predicting missing votes. It introduces a collective‑centric evaluation framework that assesses whether inferred votes maintain key properties of the overall preference landscape, rather than focusing solely on individual prediction accuracy. Using the largest multilingual dataset to date—four consultations with over 90,000 participants, 1 million votes, and 22 languages—the study finds that models with similar predictive accuracy can differ markedly in how well they preserve the collective structure, underscoring that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating PI in democratic contexts.
By Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, Salim Hafid, Paul Lerner, Nazanin Shafiabadi, Laur\`ene Cave, David Mas, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Benjamin Piwowarski, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon
The paper argues that AI can strengthen democracy by supporting large‑scale deliberation, addressing cognitive, social, platform‑design, and market frictions while preserving human agency. It contrasts AI‑assisted deliberation with liquid democracy, claiming the former lowers barriers to meaningful engagement without replacing human judgment. The authors outline four guiding principles—preserving agency, encouraging mutual respect, promoting equality, and augmenting active citizenship—and discuss challenges such as alignment, sycophancy, bias, and over‑reliance. They call on the machine learning community to develop and evaluate deliberation‑focused AI systems based on their ability to facilitate informed, representative, and friction‑robust discourse.
By Jos\'e Ram\'on Enr\'iquez, Jiaxin Pei, Alex Pentland
AI systems can strengthen democracy by supporting deliberation at scale by addressing cognitive, social, platform-design, and market-driven frictions, while preserving human agency. Unlike proposals s...
Large Language Models (LLMs) as judges across various scenarios such as assessing model responses is becoming an increasingly accepted paradigm. However, existing judgment approaches often rely on trained judgers using fixed preference data, which tend to overlook diverse user preferences and struggle to adapt to real-world human-AI dialogue scenarios.
arXiv:2603. 23841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as primary sources of information, their potential for political bias may impact their objectivity.
By Rohan Khetan, Ashna Khetan
arXiv:2605. 01642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prevailing alignment methods target a fixed set of preferences and therefore risk forcing value lock-in as societal norms evolve over time.
By Rachel Freedman
arXiv:2606. 30116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pairwise preference data is widely used for training and evaluating language models (e.
By Eleanor Clifford, Michael Amir, Arduin Findeis, Aaron Zhao, Robert Mullins
The paper introduces “Persuasio”, a multi‑agent dialogue platform that uses a formal argumentation theory to adjudicate winners in free‑text debates. Using this system, the authors generated 192 debates on a UK political topic involving humans and large language models (LLMs), and evaluated 22 interlocutors through automated adjudication and 9,702 crowdsourced pairwise judgments across 1,386 annotation instances. The results show a consistent decoupling between subjective persuasiveness—where LLMs dominate—and formal argumentative strength—where humans remain competitive, with multi‑agent and retrieval‑augmented variants widening this gap.
By Jordan Robinson, Angus R. Williams, Katie Atkinson, Anthony G. Cohn
arXiv:2608. 10186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed in settings that require collective reasoning on complex, value-laden problems.
By Maurice Flechtner
arXiv:2609.15207v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Generative AI writing assistants and the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power them are increasingly part of how voters gather information before ele...
By Bastiaan Bruinsma, Annika Fred\'en, Paul R\"ottger, Moa Johansson, Asad Sayeed
PADM'E is a method for synthesizing preference‑aligned data to meta‑evaluate language‑model (LM) evaluators of agentic behaviors. It reframes meta‑evaluation as a preference judgment problem, generating criterion‑based data with small LMs and no human involvement. In a prototype, PADM'E produced 1,000 samples across four domains and three criteria, and human validation showed agreement with human judgment rising from 73% to 85% compared to a naive baseline.
By Cheng Chang, Yining Mao, Peng Qi
Political debates are often analyzed through Argument Mining (AM) to investigate the key arguments that drive them. However, political arguments are rarely interpretable from argumentative spans alone...