Debate Helps Weak Judges Reward Stronger Models 文章

arXiv:2605.27483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite theoretical promise, debate as a scalable oversight protocol has produced mixed empirical results: gains in some settings, and null effects in others, especially when the judge does not have information hidden from it. We study proposer-critic debate in a stronger-debater/weaker-judge setting on programmatically verifiable code and logic tasks. Debate helps the judge over a consultancy baseline when the critic provides a usable advantage: the critic's classification ability must exceed the judge's, and the judge must treat critic speeches as claims to verify rather than testimony to summarize. On the three of five pairings where the condition holds, proposer-critic debate's gains are statistically significant over consultancy, and these pairings are the most capable model pairings.