English

Debating the Unspoken: Role-Anchored Multi-Agent Reasoning for Half-Truth Detection

Computation and Language 2026-04-22 v1

Abstract

Half-truths, claims that are factually correct yet misleading due to omitted context, remain a blind spot for fact verification systems focused on explicit falsehoods. Addressing such omission-based manipulation requires reasoning not only about what is said, but also about what is left unsaid. We propose RADAR, a role-anchored multi-agent debate framework for omission-aware fact verification under realistic, noisy retrieval. RADAR assigns complementary roles to a Politician and a Scientist, who reason adversarially over shared retrieved evidence, moderated by a neutral Judge. A dual-threshold early termination controller adaptively decides when sufficient reasoning has been reached to issue a verdict. Experiments show that RADAR consistently outperforms strong single- and multi-agent baselines across datasets and backbones, improving omission detection accuracy while reducing reasoning cost. These results demonstrate that role-anchored, retrieval-grounded debate with adaptive control is an effective and scalable framework for uncovering missing context in fact verification. The code is available at https://github.com/tangyixuan/RADAR.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.19005,
  title  = {Debating the Unspoken: Role-Anchored Multi-Agent Reasoning for Half-Truth Detection},
  author = {Yixuan Tang and Yirui Zhang and Hang Feng and Anthony K. H. Tung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19005},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACL 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:27:36.752Z