Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models via Debates

Behrad Moniri, Hamed Hassani, Edgar Dobriban


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving and impacting various fields, necessitating the development of effective methods to evaluate and compare their performance. Most current approaches for performance evaluation are either based on fixed, domain-specific questions that lack the flexibility required in many real-world applications, or rely on human input, making them unscalable. To address these issues, we propose an automated benchmarking framework based on debates between LLMs, judged by another LLM. This method assesses not only domain knowledge, but also skills such as argumentative reasoning and inconsistency recognition. We evaluate the performance of various state-of-the-art LLMs using the debate framework and achieve rankings that align closely with popular rankings based on human input, eliminating the need for costly human crowdsourcing.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.109
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2040–2075
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.109/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Behrad Moniri, Hamed Hassani, and Edgar Dobriban. 2025. Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models via Debates. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 2040–2075, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models via Debates (Moniri et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.109.pdf