ARGUS: Theory-of-Mind Guided Argument Generation with Strategy-Aware Planning and Knowledge Grounding

Abstract

Persuasive argument generation requires modeling audience beliefs, rhetorical strategies, and factual grounding. Despite recent advancements, existing methods remain largely audience-agnostic and fail to integrate strategy selection to improve persuasiveness. To bridge this gap, we propose Argus, an agent-based framework that operationalizes classical rhetoric for persuasive writing. At its core, a Theory-of-Mind (ToM) Reasoner constructs an explicit dual mental model of the audience's beliefs and values to guide downstream decisions. This representation conditions a component-aware planner that decomposes the argument into subtopics, assigns fine-grained rhetorical functions (logos, pathos, ethos), and triggers strategy-guided evidence retrieval at planning time. Finally, a refinement module iteratively targets and resolves multi-dimensional weaknesses without quality regression. We evaluate Argus across three diverse benchmarks using both automated pairwise Elo and LLM-as-judge metrics. Results show that Argus consistently outperforms strong baselines across multiple backbone models, achieving top rankings and the highest overall scores. Targeted simulation experiments further validate its effectiveness in shifting resistant audience stances.