Can LLMs Beat Humans in Debating? A Dynamic Multi-agent Framework for Competitive Debate

Competitive debate is a comprehensive and complex computational argumentation task. Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter hallucinations and lack competitiveness in this task. To address these challenges, we introduce Agent for Debate (Agent4Debate), a dynamic, multi-agent framework based on LLMs designed to enhance their capabilities in competitive debate. Drawing inspiration from human behavior in debate preparation and execution, Agent4Debate employs a collaborative architecture where four specialized agents (Searcher, Analyzer, Writer, and Reviewer) dynamically interact and cooperate. These agents work throughout the debate process, covering multiple stages from initial research and argument formulation to rebuttal and summary. To comprehensively evaluate framework performance, we construct the Chinese Debate Arena, comprising 66 carefully selected Chinese debate motions. We recruite ten experienced human debaters and collect records of 200 debates involving Agent4Debate, baseline models, and humans. The evaluation employs the Debatrix automatic scoring system and professional human reviewers based on the established Debatrix-Elo and Human-Elo ranking. Experimental results indicate that the state-of-the-art Agent4Debate exhibits capabilities comparable to those of humans. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the agent structure.