{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreidxfq4so6g52yofa3mdl5wnpaqcdblmeudwpqs3l4wk5t3xv7i7pm",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:4rgrdigiftglskeax4wvmsev/app.bsky.feed.post/3mekgfphmdqu2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreiflo6xt7is6b2iafwghkjahlgggocme5jwjsbeuqqwcywuvjhmszm"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/png",
    "size": 24783
  },
  "path": "/abs/2602.08630v1",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-10T01:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://arxiv.org",
  "tags": [
    "Jonah Brown-Cohen",
    "Geoffrey Irving",
    "Simon C. Marshall",
    "Ilan Newman",
    "Georgios Piliouras",
    "Mario Szegedy"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Authors:** Jonah Brown-Cohen, Geoffrey Irving, Simon C. Marshall, Ilan Newman, Georgios Piliouras, Mario Szegedy\n\nAI safety via debate uses two competing models to help a human judge verify complex computational tasks. Previous work has established what problems debate can solve in principle, but has not analysed the practical cost of human oversight: how many queries must the judge make to the debate transcript? We introduce Debate Query Complexity}(DQC), the minimum number of bits a verifier must inspect to correctly decide a debate. Surprisingly, we find that PSPACE/poly (the class of problems which debate can efficiently decide) is precisely the class of functions decidable with O(log n) queries. This characterisation shows that debate is remarkably query-efficient: even for highly complex problems, logarithmic oversight suffices. We also establish that functions depending on all their input bits require Omega(log n) queries, and that any function computable by a circuit of size s satisfies DQC(f) <= log(s) + 3. Interestingly, this last result implies that proving DQC lower bounds of log(n) + 6 for languages in P would yield new circuit lower bounds, connecting debate query complexity to central questions in circuit complexity.",
  "title": "Debate is efficient with your time"
}