PERSUASIONTRACE introduces a Bayesian-network simulated target for multi-turn persuasion that matches human belief dynamics (81 vs 80) better than LLM baselines (64) and enables process-level evaluation.
Honesty Is the Best Policy: Defining and Mitigating AI Deception
2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
Deceptive agents are a challenge for the safety, trustworthiness, and cooperation of AI systems. We focus on the problem that agents might deceive in order to achieve their goals (for instance, in our experiments with language models, the goal of being evaluated as truthful). There are a number of existing definitions of deception in the literature on game theory and symbolic AI, but there is no overarching theory of deception for learning agents in games. We introduce a formal definition of deception in structural causal games, grounded in the philosophy literature, and applicable to real-world machine learning systems. Several examples and results illustrate that our formal definition aligns with the philosophical and commonsense meaning of deception. Our main technical result is to provide graphical criteria for deception. We show, experimentally, that these results can be used to mitigate deception in reinforcement learning agents and language models.
years
2026 2representative citing papers
Adversarial agents can exploit visible chain-of-thought reasoning to persuade monitor LLMs to approve policy-violating actions, but cross-family fact-checking reduces approval rates by up to 45%.
citing papers explorer
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A Model of Multi-turn Human Persuadability Using Probabilistic Belief Tracing
PERSUASIONTRACE introduces a Bayesian-network simulated target for multi-turn persuasion that matches human belief dynamics (81 vs 80) better than LLM baselines (64) and enables process-level evaluation.
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Persuasion Attacks Can Decrease Effectiveness of CoT Monitoring
Adversarial agents can exploit visible chain-of-thought reasoning to persuade monitor LLMs to approve policy-violating actions, but cross-family fact-checking reduces approval rates by up to 45%.