Chaithanya Bandi
2026
Debate, Deliberate, Decide (D3): A Cost-Aware Adversarial Framework for Reliable and Interpretable LLM Evaluation
Abir Harrasse | Chaithanya Bandi | Hari Bandi
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Abir Harrasse | Chaithanya Bandi | Hari Bandi
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging due to inconsistency, bias, and the absence of transparent decision criteria in automated judging. We present Debate, Deliberate, Decide (D3), a cost-aware, adversarial multi-agent framework that orchestrates structured debate among role-specialized agents (advocates, a judge, and an optional jury) to produce reliable and interpretable evaluations. D3 instantiates two complementary protocols: (1) Multi-Advocate One-Round Evaluation (MORE), which elicits k parallel defenses per answer to amplify signal via diverse advocacy, and (2) Single-Advocate Multi-Round Evaluation (SAMRE) with budgeted stopping, which iteratively refines arguments under an explicit token budget and convergence checks.We develop a probabilistic model of score gaps that (i) characterizes reliability and convergence under iterative debate and (ii) explains the separation gains from parallel advocacy. Under mild assumptions, the posterior distribution of the round-r gap concentrates around the true difference and the probability of mis-ranking vanishes; moreover, aggregating across k advocates provably increases expected score separation. We complement theory with a rigorous experimental suite across MT-Bench, AlignBench, and AUTO-J, showing state-of-the-art agreement with human judgments (accuracy and Cohen’s 𝜅), reduced positional and verbosity biases via anonymization and role diversification, and a favorable cost-accuracy frontier enabled by budgeted stopping. Ablations and qualitative analyses isolate the contributions of debate, aggregation, and anonymity.Together, these results establish D3 as a principled, practical recipe for reliable, interpretable, and cost-aware LLM evaluation.
Make Mechanistic Interpretability Auditable: A Call to Develop Guidelines via Continuous Collaborative Reviewing
Michael Lan | Narmeen Fatimah Oozeer | Chaithanya Bandi | Philip Quirke | Austin Meek | Fazl Barez | Amir Abdullah
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Michael Lan | Narmeen Fatimah Oozeer | Chaithanya Bandi | Philip Quirke | Austin Meek | Fazl Barez | Amir Abdullah
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While mechanistic interpretability (MI) has produced important insights into neural network internals, the field has yet to establish a standardized system to audit experiments. As such, many of its findings remain underutilized in safety-critical applications such as medical AI and autonomous systems, as stakeholders cannot certify their validity. Recent work demonstrates this concretely: two papers found conflicting conclusions for the same behavior, and a third study revealed that both were partially correct but incomparable due to methodological inconsistencies. Without standardized auditing, such ambiguities hinder adoption in high-stakes contexts requiring strong correctness guarantees. We call for the MI community to work towards developing a novel reviewing system that complements peer review via: (1) Continuous reviewing supported by a Collaborative Reviewing Platform where meta-science results and discussions (such as critiques, negative results, post-hoc extensions, reproductions, replications, and partial results) that fit outside of papers are organized and discussed, allowing for comments and revisions to be made at any time (2) Generalizing good practices found on this platform into expert-verified guidelines and protocols to improve auditing efficiency, and (3) Source-based auditing systems that track arguments which claims depend on. This position paper encourages constructive debate over the necessity, design and implementation of such a framework, providing early concrete examples to help catalyze these dialogues. Overall, we propose that auditing MI itself is essential for its application in AI safety, industry, and governance.