The paper proposes a transparent, user‑configurable rule for selecting arguments in deliberative polls, replacing opaque learned rankers. It formalises argument selection over bipolar justification sets, introduces seven civic recommender criteria, and presents a one‑hop reversed endorsement flow rule that meets them. Experiments on 17,000 simulated runs show the rule performs comparably to random on coverage but outperforms other methods on endorsement mass and robustness under adversarial pressure.
By Muntaser Syed, Markus Zanker, Marius Silaghi
The paper introduces Bayesian Dialectical Argumentation (BDA), a method for aggregating answers from multiple large language models (LLMs) in a council setting. BDA treats each LLM’s typed moves—proposals, challenges, and concessions—as evidence in a classical annotator model, estimating per-agent reliability even when some agents are persistently unreliable. By weighting evidence according to these inferred reliabilities, BDA produces calibrated posterior probabilities for candidate answers and can invert unreliable agents instead of merely outvoting them, achieving superior calibration and robustness on both binary and multi-class benchmarks without extra LLM calls.
By Ionel Eduard Stan, Paolo Napoletano
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
arXiv:2609.08016v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-agent debate, in which several LLMs exchange arguments before answering, is widely assumed to improve answer quality by surfacing genuine disagre...
By Chen Qian
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...
arXiv:2607. 15095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The formation of political coalitions is a complex negotiation driven by both concrete policy objectives and deep-seated ideological convictions.
By Dylan Van Mulders, Matthias Bogaert, Dirk Van den Poel
The study evaluates multi‑agent debate (MAD) in small language models, testing whether cognitive diversity—via personas, sampling temperature, or model identity—drives performance gains. Across 23 models, five tasks, and over 5,500 runs, MAD consistently outperforms single‑model inference but, when matched for generation budget, it ties or falls behind self‑consistency sampling, with persona prompting actually reducing accuracy. The authors find that MAD’s benefits largely stem from the first answer exchange and that many reported gains are due to ensemble‑sampling effects rather than true diversity, highlighting the need for budget‑matched, contamination‑checked baselines.
whyItMatters":"The findings clarify that MAD’s perceived advantages may be overestimated and that future debate mechanisms must be evaluated against rigorous, budget‑matched baselines to ensure genuine performance improvements."
By Leonardo Ferreira, Gardenia Liu, Kaden Zheng
arXiv:2608. 14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems make more morally loaded decisions across society, one response has been moral preference elicitation.
By Taenyun Kim, Edyta Bogucka, Daniele Quercia
arXiv:2505. 22961v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising potential in persuasion, but existing works on training LLM persuaders are still preliminary.
By Peixuan Han, Zijia Liu, Jiaxuan You
The paper introduces DNE‑ElecDeb, an enriched version of the USElecDeb dataset that annotates Debate Named Entities (DNEs) in both argumentative and non‑argumentative spans, and defines Debate Named Entity Recognition (DNER) as a new task. It proposes Joint Argument and Entity Tagging (JAET), a generative framework that fine‑tunes decoder‑only LLMs to insert inline argument and entity tags into debate turns while preserving the original transcript. JAET achieves significant improvements in joint AM+DNER performance (+27.3% relative F1 in the untyped setting and +41.9% in the typed setting) over sequential pipelines, and these gains generalize to Persuasive Essays (+26.6% and +52.7%).
By Lucio La Cava, Stefano Francesco Monea, Sergio Greco
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: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