Probably Approximately Consensus: On the Learning Theory of Finding Common Ground

Carter Blair, Ben Armstrong, Shiri Alouf-Heffetz, Nimrod Talmon, Davide Grossi|April 23, 2026arXiv

Key Takeaway

You can find practical consensus in large communities by treating it as a learning problem—identifying opinion intervals that maximize agreement while accounting for topic importance, with provable guarantees on how many user queries you actually need.

Summary

This paper tackles finding consensus in online communities by modeling agreement as an interval in opinion space. Rather than just looking at specific statements users provide, the method accounts for which topics matter most to the community.

reasoning evaluation

Key Terms

pac-learning empirical-risk-minimization dimensionality-reduction consensus-architecture