# Stance Detection with Collaborative Role-Infused LLM-Based Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10467 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10467/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 36 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Tool Makers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17126/) (2023)
- [Opportunities and Challenges in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11371/) (2020)
- [Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03514/) (2023)
- [S3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14984/) (2023)
- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [Language Models Meet World Models: Embodied Experiences Enhance Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10626/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Stance Detection: A Dataset and Model using Generalized Topic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03640/) (2020)
- [Stance Detection on Social Media: State of the Art and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03644/) (2020)
- [Stance Detection with Bidirectional Conditional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05464/) (2016)
- [How would Stance Detection Techniques Evolve after the Launch of ChatGPT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14548/) (2022)
- [Aspect-based Sentiment Classification with Aspect-specific Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03477/) (2019)
- [Stance and Sentiment in Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01655/) (2016)
- [Will-They-Won't-They: A Very Large Dataset for Stance Detection on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00388/) (2020)
- [DERA: Enhancing Large Language Model Completions with Dialog-Enabled Resolving Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17071/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11970/) (2023)
- [Depression Detection on Social Media with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10750/) (2024)
- [HLM-Cite: Hybrid Language Model Workflow for Text-based Scientific Citation Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09112/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Human-Centric LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14491/) (2024)
- [LLM Chain Ensembles for Scalable and Accurate Data Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13006/) (2024)
- [Faithful, Unfaithful or Ambiguous? Multi-Agent Debate with Initial Stance for Summary Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08514/) (2025)
- [PolicySim: An LLM-Based Agent Social Simulation Sandbox for Proactive Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19649/) (2026)
- [Tell me what I need to know: Exploring LLM-based (Personalized) Abstractive Multi-Source Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14545/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Subjective Language Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07959/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Stance Detection on Social Media: New Directions and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15690/) (2024)
- [MCRanker: Generating Diverse Criteria On-the-Fly to Improve Point-wise LLM Rankers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11960/) (2024)
- [MultiClimate: Multimodal Stance Detection on Climate Change Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18346/) (2024)
- [LLM-Enhanced Multiple Instance Learning for Joint Rumor and Stance Detection with Social Context Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08888/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Meet Stance Detection: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08464/) (2025)
- [Debating Truth: Debate-driven Claim Verification with Multiple Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19090/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Biases of Large Language Models in Stance Detection with Counterfactual Augmented Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14296/) (2024)
- [Stance Detection on Social Media with Fine-Tuned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12171/) (2024)
- [Chain of Stance: Stance Detection with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04649/) (2024)
- [Labeling Free-text Data using Language Model Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08413/) (2025)
- [C-MTCSD: A Chinese Multi-Turn Conversational Stance Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09958/) (2025)
- [Cross-Target Stance Detection: A Survey of Techniques, Datasets, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13594/) (2024)
- [MODS: Moderating a Mixture of Document Speakers to Summarize Debatable Queries in Document Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00322/) (2025)
- [LLM-Explorer: A Plug-in Reinforcement Learning Policy Exploration Enhancement Driven by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15293/) (2025)
- [Is External Information Useful for Stance Detection with LLMs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01543/) (2025)
- [LocalGPT: Benchmarking and Advancing Large Language Models for Local Life Services in Meituan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02720/) (2025)
- [Beyond True or False: Retrieval-Augmented Hierarchical Analysis of Nuanced Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10728/) (2025)
- [AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08081/) (2025)
- [MSME: A Multi-Stage Multi-Expert Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04492/) (2025)
- [Yes FLoReNce, I Will Do Better Next Time! Agentic Feedback Reasoning for Humorous Meme Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07232/) (2026)
- [MM-StanceDet: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-modal Multi-agent Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27934/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Stance detection automatically detects the stance in a text towards a target, vital for content analysis in web and social media research. Despite their promising capabilities, LLMs encounter challenges when directly applied to stance detection. First, stance detection demands multi-aspect knowledge, from deciphering event-related terminologies to understanding the expression styles in social media platforms. Second, stance detection requires advanced reasoning to infer authors' implicit viewpoints, as stance are often subtly embedded rather than overtly stated in the text. To address these challenges, we design a three-stage framework COLA (short for Collaborative rOle-infused LLM-based Agents) in which LLMs are designated distinct roles, creating a collaborative system where each role contributes uniquely. Initially, in the multidimensional text analysis stage, we configure the LLMs to act as a linguistic expert, a domain specialist, and a social media veteran to get a multifaceted analysis of texts, thus overcoming the first challenge. Next, in the reasoning-enhanced debating stage, for each potential stance, we designate a specific LLM-based agent to advocate for it, guiding the LLM to detect logical connections between text features and stance, tackling the second challenge. Finally, in the stance conclusion stage, a final decision maker agent consolidates prior insights to determine the stance. Our approach avoids extra annotated data and model training and is highly usable. We achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each design role in handling stance detection. Further experiments have demonstrated the explainability and the versatility of our approach. Our approach excels in usability, accuracy, effectiveness, explainability and versatility, highlighting its value.