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arXiv · 2606.05563

SoCRATES: Towards Reliable Automated Evaluation of Proactive LLM Mediation across Domains and Socio-cognitive Variations

Abstract

Evaluating LLM mediators remains challenging, as mediation unfolds as a real-time trajectory shaped by disputants' shifting emotions, intentions, and context. Existing testbeds rely on a few expert-authored domains, vary mainly strategic posture, and score every turn against every topic, introducing off-topic noise. We introduce SoCRATES, a benchmark for evaluating proactive LLM mediators in realistic, multi-domain testbeds. It constructs scenarios from real conflicts through an agentic pipeline across eight domains, probes five socio-cognitive adaptation axes (strategic posture, party composition, history length, emotional reactivity, and cultural identity), and scores each topic only on the turns that advance it via a topic-localized evaluator. The evaluator reaches 0.82 alignment with human experts, more than doubling a per-turn baseline. Benchmarking eight frontier LLMs, we find that even the strongest mediator closes only about a third of the unmediated consensus gap under diverse and realistic testbeds, with performance varying sharply by socio-cognitive axis, highlighting that progress lies in social adaptation to diverse conditions.

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Taewon Yun, Hyeonseong Park, Jeonghwan Choi, Hayoon Park, Yeeun Choi, Hwanjun Song. 2026-06-04. SoCRATES: Towards Reliable Automated Evaluation of Proactive LLM Mediation across Domains and Socio-cognitive Variations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05563

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