Tree-of-Debate: Multi-Persona Debate Trees Elicit Critical Thinking for
  Scientific Comparative Analysis
Authors: name: Priyanka Kargupta; name: Ishika Agarwal; name: Tal August; name: Jiawei Han
Published: 2025-02-20 17:43:40

Abstract: With the exponential growth of research facilitated by modern technology and
improved accessibility, scientific discoveries have become increasingly
fragmented within and across fields. This makes it challenging to assess the
significance, novelty, incremental findings, and equivalent ideas between
related works, particularly those from different research communities. Large
language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong quantitative and
qualitative reasoning abilities, and multi-agent LLM debates have shown promise
in handling complex reasoning tasks by exploring diverse perspectives and
reasoning paths. Inspired by this, we introduce Tree-of-Debate (ToD), a
framework which converts scientific papers into LLM personas that debate their
respective novelties. To emphasize structured, critical reasoning rather than
focusing solely on outcomes, ToD dynamically constructs a debate tree, enabling
fine-grained analysis of independent novelty arguments within scholarly
articles. Through experiments on scientific literature across various domains,
evaluated by expert researchers, we demonstrate that ToD generates informative
arguments, effectively contrasts papers, and supports researchers in their
literature review.