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Hauptverfasser: Adhikari, Ashutosh, Lapata, Mirella
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14627
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author Adhikari, Ashutosh
Lapata, Mirella
author_facet Adhikari, Ashutosh
Lapata, Mirella
contents As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain expertise across diverse domains and modalities, scalable oversight becomes increasingly challenging, particularly when their capabilities may surpass human evaluators. Debate has emerged as a promising mechanism for enabling such oversight. In this work, we extend the debate paradigm to a multimodal setting, exploring its potential for weaker models to supervise and enhance the performance of stronger models. We focus on visual question answering (VQA), where two "sighted" expert vision-language models debate an answer, while a "blind" (text-only) judge adjudicates based solely on the quality of the arguments. In our framework, the experts defend only answers aligned with their beliefs, thereby obviating the need for explicit role-playing and concentrating the debate on instances of expert disagreement. Experiments on several multimodal tasks demonstrate that the debate framework consistently outperforms individual expert models. Moreover, judgments from weaker LLMs can help instill reasoning capabilities in vision-language models through finetuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14627
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Debating for Better Reasoning: An Unsupervised Multimodal Approach
Adhikari, Ashutosh
Lapata, Mirella
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain expertise across diverse domains and modalities, scalable oversight becomes increasingly challenging, particularly when their capabilities may surpass human evaluators. Debate has emerged as a promising mechanism for enabling such oversight. In this work, we extend the debate paradigm to a multimodal setting, exploring its potential for weaker models to supervise and enhance the performance of stronger models. We focus on visual question answering (VQA), where two "sighted" expert vision-language models debate an answer, while a "blind" (text-only) judge adjudicates based solely on the quality of the arguments. In our framework, the experts defend only answers aligned with their beliefs, thereby obviating the need for explicit role-playing and concentrating the debate on instances of expert disagreement. Experiments on several multimodal tasks demonstrate that the debate framework consistently outperforms individual expert models. Moreover, judgments from weaker LLMs can help instill reasoning capabilities in vision-language models through finetuning.
title Debating for Better Reasoning: An Unsupervised Multimodal Approach
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14627