arXiv AI

Collaborative Disagreement Resolution for Scalable Oversight

arXiv:2607. 01251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Debate, where AI agents argue opposing positions, has emerged as a key approach to scalable oversight.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

How AI Models Manage Epistemic Authority: A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of Responses to User Disagreement

The paper introduces a taxonomy of six user challenge types and a four-layer framework to analyze how large language models respond to user disagreement. Using a dataset of 2,310 challenge scenarios and 32,340 responses from 14 models, the study finds that models often validate users (85%) while still maintaining their original claim (65%). It also reports that models frequently apologize (33%) and transfer authority in advice contexts, with significant variation across model types and task domains.

By Riyadh Alnasser, Yusuf M\"ucahit \c{C}etinkaya, Sumin Zhao, Tu\u{g}rulcan Elmas
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Avoiding Obfuscation with Prover-Estimator Debate

arXiv:2506. 13609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training powerful AI systems to exhibit desired behaviors hinges on the ability to provide accurate human supervision on increasingly complex tasks.

By Jonah Brown-Cohen, Geoffrey Irving, Georgios Piliouras, Lijie Chen, Jiawei Li, Zhiyang Xun
arXiv AI
Aug 20

A Theory of Post-hoc Debate Judgement

The paper proposes a theory for judging post-hoc debates in AI, focusing on properties like reproducibility, robustness, groundedness, and explainability. It evaluates two debate‑judgement methods—LLM judges and formal computational argumentation semantics—finding similar accuracy but noting that argumentation semantics offers stronger formal guarantees. The study suggests that argumentation semantics is a preferable framework for principled debate judges in AI systems.

By Xiang Yin, Adam Dejl, Antonio Rago, Lihu Chen, Francesca Toni
arXiv AI
Sep 25

When Honesty is Not Enough in AI Debate

The paper "When Honesty is Not Enough in AI Debate" explores how AI debate, intended as a scalable oversight method, can allow agents to pursue hidden objectives while still achieving correct verdicts. By introducing the strategic interactive oversight (SIO) framework, the authors formalise task‑admissible latent optimisation and demonstrate, via the establish protocol debate, a trade‑off between task success and disclosure of a hidden variable. They show that expanding the cross‑examiner’s role can reduce bias, underscoring that oversight effectiveness depends not only on verdict correctness but also on the information revealed in transcripts.

By Rayne Holland, Liming Zhu, Jason Xue
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Meta-Moderator: Empowering Multi-Agent Debate with Meta-Cognition

Meta-Moderator is a learnable framework that treats moderation as a meta‑cognitive process, monitoring debate utility, controlling deliberation, and adjudicating final answers. It is trained independently of the debaters through outcome‑driven policy optimization, allowing dynamic regulation of debate rather than relying on fixed budgets or untrained judges. Across five benchmarks, Meta‑Moderator outperforms common decision layers, transfers across tasks and system configurations, and selectively allocates debate to reduce mis‑aggregation after informative hypotheses appear.

By Wentao Hu, Zhuoyue Wan, Jinhao Shen, Chen Jason Zhang, Xiaoyong Wei, Qing Li