[2603.28488] Courtroom-Style Multi-Agent Debate with Progressive RAG and Role-Switching for Controversial Claim Verification

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.28488 (cs) [Submitted on 30 Mar 2026] Title:Courtroom-Style Multi-Agent Debate with Progressive RAG and Role-Switching for Controversial Claim Verification Authors:Masnun Nuha Chowdhury, Nusrat Jahan Beg, Umme Hunny Khan, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Md Kamrul Hasan, Hasan Mahmud View a PDF of the paper titled Courtroom-Style Multi-Agent Debate with Progressive RAG and Role-Switching for Controversial Claim Verification, by Masnun Nuha Chowdhury and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for high-stakes claim verification due to hallucinations and shallow reasoning. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and multi-agent debate (MAD) address this, they are limited by one-pass retrieval and unstructured debate dynamics. We propose a courtroom-style multi-agent framework, PROClaim, that reformulates verification as a structured, adversarial deliberation. Our approach integrates specialized roles (e.g., Plaintiff, Defense, Judge) with Progressive RAG (P-RAG) to dynamically expand and refine the evidence pool during the debate. Furthermore, we employ evidence negotiation, self-reflection, and heterogeneous multi-judge aggregation to enforce calibration, robustness, and diversity. In zero-shot evaluations on the Check-COVID benchmark, PROClaim achieves 81.7% accuracy, outperforming standard multi-agent debate by 10.0 percentage points, with P-RAG driving the primary per...