arXiv AI

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.

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 Computation and Language
2d ago

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
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
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Mixture of Debaters: Learn to Debate at Architectural Level in Multi-Agent Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 29425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing multi-agent debate frameworks suffer from two critical limitations: they rely on static architectures where agent roles and coordination patterns are fixed at design time, and they require instantiating multiple model copies, incurring substantial computational overhead.

By Dayong Liang, Kaisong Gong, Yi Cai, Changmeng Zheng, Xiao-Yong Wei