arXiv AI

From Simulated Citizens to Simulated Deliberation: Challenges in Representation and Interaction

The paper investigates whether large language model (LLM) agents can simulate public deliberation by reflecting population opinion patterns and producing interaction-driven opinion change. Using census‑grounded Korean personas debating real policy questions, the study finds that persona agents fail to reliably reproduce population opinion patterns, often concentrating responses and reversing demographic differences. While deliberations generate reasoned, reciprocal arguments and some stance movement, much of this change occurs without peer exchange, and anchoring agents to population‑informed starting positions suppresses updating, indicating that population representation, argument generation, and interaction‑driven opinion change do not necessarily align.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Evaluating the Capabilities of LLMs for Persuasive Dialogue

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 AI
Sep 10

The Failure Happens Before the Drift: The Social Dynamics of Values in LLM Agent Societies

The study introduces a World Values Survey–grounded simulation framework to test whether large language model agents can faithfully represent diverse human value systems. In about 4,000 conversations with 1,200 personas across three models, more than half of the agents failed to express their assigned value profiles from the start, and only 2–7% drifted over time. The results show systematic deviations from the intended value distributions and reveal that simulated dialogues differ from human discussions in their balance of stylistic consistency and semantic diversity.

By Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Demystifying Multi-Agent Debate: The Role of Confidence and Diversity

arXiv:2601. 19921v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) is widely used to improve large language model (LLM) performance through test-time scaling, yet recent work shows that vanilla MAD often underperforms simple majority vote despite higher computational cost.

By Xiaochen Zhu, Caiqi Zhang, Yizhou Chi, Tom Stafford, Nigel Collier, Andreas Vlachos