Stimulate the Critical Thinking of LLMs via Debiasing Discussion

Ruiyu Xiao, Lei Wu, Yuanxing Liu, Weinan Zhang, Ting Liu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) often succumb to users’ viewpoints when faced with conflicting perspectives. We identify two key biases underlying this issue : stance homogeneity bias and human preference bias. To address these biases, we propose a novel two-stage training framework: Multi-stance Discussion Sampling and Truth Alignment Training (MDTA). First, we introduce an equal multi-stance discussion framework to automatically generate multi-model discussion datasets. Based on this framework, we construct the first and largest multi-model fair discussion dataset named Eq-Discussion for supervised fine-tuning, reducing stance homogeneity bias. Second, we optimize Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align with discussion correctness, mitigating human preference bias. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MDTA effectively reduces both biases and significantly enhances the performance of LLMs across a variety of downstream tasks, including reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and social question answering. Furthermore, we observe that MDTA improves the generalization capabilities of LLMs, leading to substantial performance improvements in non-discussion scenarios and on out-of-domain datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.579
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11490–11503
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.579/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruiyu Xiao, Lei Wu, Yuanxing Liu, Weinan Zhang, and Ting Liu. 2025. Stimulate the Critical Thinking of LLMs via Debiasing Discussion. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11490–11503, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stimulate the Critical Thinking of LLMs via Debiasing Discussion (Xiao et al., EMNLP 2025)
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