A superpersuasive autonomous policy debating system

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Roush, Allen, Gonier, Devin, Hines, John, Goldfeder, Judah, Wyder, Philippe Martin, Basu, Sanjay, Ziv, Ravid Shwartz
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Roush, Allen
Gonier, Devin
Hines, John
Goldfeder, Judah
Wyder, Philippe Martin
Basu, Sanjay
Ziv, Ravid Shwartz
author_facet Roush, Allen
Gonier, Devin
Hines, John
Goldfeder, Judah
Wyder, Philippe Martin
Basu, Sanjay
Ziv, Ravid Shwartz
contents The capacity for highly complex, evidence-based, and strategically adaptive persuasion remains a formidable great challenge for artificial intelligence. Previous work, like IBM Project Debater, focused on generating persuasive speeches in simplified and shortened debate formats intended for relatively lay audiences. We introduce DeepDebater, a novel autonomous system capable of participating in and winning a full, unmodified, two-team competitive policy debate. Our system employs a hierarchical architecture of specialized multi-agent workflows, where teams of LLM-powered agents collaborate and critique one another to perform discrete argumentative tasks. Each workflow utilizes iterative retrieval, synthesis, and self-correction using a massive corpus of policy debate evidence (OpenDebateEvidence) and produces complete speech transcripts, cross-examinations, and rebuttals. We introduce a live, interactive end-to-end presentation pipeline that renders debates with AI speech and animation: transcripts are surface-realized and synthesized to audio with OpenAI TTS, and then displayed as talking-head portrait videos with EchoMimic V1. Beyond fully autonomous matches (AI vs AI), DeepDebater supports hybrid human-AI operation: human debaters can intervene at any stage, and humans can optionally serve as opponents against AI in any speech, allowing AI-human and AI-AI rounds. In preliminary evaluations against human-authored cases, DeepDebater produces qualitatively superior argumentative components and consistently wins simulated rounds as adjudicated by an independent autonomous judge. Expert human debate coaches also prefer the arguments, evidence, and cases constructed by DeepDebater. We open source all code, generated speech transcripts, audio and talking head video here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/DeepDebater/tree/main
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17854
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A superpersuasive autonomous policy debating system
Roush, Allen
Gonier, Devin
Hines, John
Goldfeder, Judah
Wyder, Philippe Martin
Basu, Sanjay
Ziv, Ravid Shwartz
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Multiagent Systems
The capacity for highly complex, evidence-based, and strategically adaptive persuasion remains a formidable great challenge for artificial intelligence. Previous work, like IBM Project Debater, focused on generating persuasive speeches in simplified and shortened debate formats intended for relatively lay audiences. We introduce DeepDebater, a novel autonomous system capable of participating in and winning a full, unmodified, two-team competitive policy debate. Our system employs a hierarchical architecture of specialized multi-agent workflows, where teams of LLM-powered agents collaborate and critique one another to perform discrete argumentative tasks. Each workflow utilizes iterative retrieval, synthesis, and self-correction using a massive corpus of policy debate evidence (OpenDebateEvidence) and produces complete speech transcripts, cross-examinations, and rebuttals. We introduce a live, interactive end-to-end presentation pipeline that renders debates with AI speech and animation: transcripts are surface-realized and synthesized to audio with OpenAI TTS, and then displayed as talking-head portrait videos with EchoMimic V1. Beyond fully autonomous matches (AI vs AI), DeepDebater supports hybrid human-AI operation: human debaters can intervene at any stage, and humans can optionally serve as opponents against AI in any speech, allowing AI-human and AI-AI rounds. In preliminary evaluations against human-authored cases, DeepDebater produces qualitatively superior argumentative components and consistently wins simulated rounds as adjudicated by an independent autonomous judge. Expert human debate coaches also prefer the arguments, evidence, and cases constructed by DeepDebater. We open source all code, generated speech transcripts, audio and talking head video here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/DeepDebater/tree/main
title A superpersuasive autonomous policy debating system
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17854