Jan 12, 2026

Adversarial Dialectics: Mitigating AI Persuasion Risks through High-Fidelity Multi-Agent Debate

Dong Chen

This project builds an AI-driven debating platform to mitigate AI persuasion risks—especially epistemic weaponization, where a model manipulates beliefs by selectively presenting true facts and omitting context. The core idea is to replace one-way persuasion with a structured adversarial process: two capable debaters argue opposing stances under enforced cross-examination, while independent agents verify evidence and map the debate’s logical structure. Rather than treating “truth” as a single model output, the system treats it as a procedure that exposes where disagreements come from—empirical claims, causal assumptions, or underlying values.

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

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The framing in this project is really interesting. Manipulation via selective presentation is an underappreciated angle on AI manipulation, and the adversarial debate architecture is a really creative approach.

I'd love to see this developed further with presentation of a few concrete examples and quantitative results. The write-up sadly doesn't really show the system in action or test whether adversarial debate actually reduces manipulation compared to single-agent interaction. A worked example walking through how the citation ledger and disagreement frontier evolve would make the contribution much more tangible.

This is a very thoughtful proposal that tackles 'epistemic weaponization' with nuance. The 'Bias Calibration' mechanism dynamically allocating context window budget to the minority viewpoint is a genuinely novel technical approach to breaking echo chambers. However, the reliance on Llama 3.1 to simulate the 'Voting Crowd' is a strong assumption; future work could prioritize validating these sentiment shifts against human baselines to prove the persuasion metrics are robust. I also felt that the latency analysis makes it hard to judge deployment viability given the complex four-agent loop. Overall, the 'Disagreement Frontier' mapping is a high-value output and the presentation was excellent.

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

(HckPrj) Adversarial Dialectics: Mitigating AI Persuasion Risks through High-Fidelity Multi-Agent Debate

},

author={

Dong Chen

},

date={

1/12/26

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

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This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.