{"paper":{"title":"Principled Agent Debate: Adversarial Arbitration for Sycophancy Reduction in Large Language Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Sam Ryan","submitted_at":"2026-04-21T10:30:25Z","abstract_excerpt":"RLHF-trained models are systematically biased toward agreement over accuracy, a structural property of the training process. We present Principled Agent Debate (PAD), a multi-agent architecture that mitigates identity-framed sycophancy by arbitrating between two models tuned to opposing philosophical dispositions, with a pragmatist synthesizer evaluating both arguments blind to their origins. This paper evaluates a prompt-based instantiation of PAD. The key mechanisms are static dispositional tuning, identity stripping before synthesis, single-round independent argumentation, and blind arbitra"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.07532","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.07532/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}