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Strategic Reasoning with Language Models

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arxiv 2305.19165 v1 pith:3X3EI2GP submitted 2023-05-30 cs.AI cs.CLcs.GTcs.HC

Strategic Reasoning with Language Models

classification cs.AI cs.CLcs.GTcs.HC
keywords strategicreasoningagentsapproachgameslanguagellmsscenarios
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Strategic reasoning enables agents to cooperate, communicate, and compete with other agents in diverse situations. Existing approaches to solving strategic games rely on extensive training, yielding strategies that do not generalize to new scenarios or games without retraining. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their ability to comprehend and generate complex, context-rich language, could prove powerful as tools for strategic gameplay. This paper introduces an approach that uses pretrained LLMs with few-shot chain-of-thought examples to enable strategic reasoning for AI agents. Our approach uses systematically generated demonstrations of reasoning about states, values, and beliefs to prompt the model. Using extensive variations of simple matrix games, we show that strategies that are derived based on systematically generated prompts generalize almost perfectly to new game structures, alternate objectives, and hidden information. Additionally, we demonstrate our approach can lead to human-like negotiation strategies in realistic scenarios without any extra training or fine-tuning. Our results highlight the ability of LLMs, guided by systematic reasoning demonstrations, to adapt and excel in diverse strategic scenarios.

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Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  4. Equilibrium Residuals Expose Three Regimes of Matrix-Game Strategic Reasoning in Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    LLMs rely on semantic cues for matrix-game equilibria but can acquire approximate computation via residual training on small instances, with a Lipschitz proof enabling transfer to larger anonymous games.

  5. Strategy, Not Payoffs: A Behavioural Embedding of Normal-Form Games

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  6. Understanding the Mechanism of Altruism in Large Language Models

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  9. Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas

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    cs.MA 2026-01 reject novelty 5.0

    Persona-conditioned LLM agents favor Green outcomes even against explicit Tragedy-dominant payoffs, but the headline 65–90% 'Tragedy equilibrium' recovery is contradicted by the paper's own appendix (0 Tragedy profile...

  11. Evaluating Large Language Models as Live Strategic Agents: Provider Performance, Hybrid Decomposition, and Operational Gaps in Timed Risk Play

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Gemini-3.1-pro-preview won 20 of 32 Risk games through superior objective tracking and execution conversion, while a hybrid test with fixed execution showed near-equal planner performance across providers.

  12. PRISMA: Preference-Reinforced Self-Training Approach for Interpretable Emotionally Intelligent Negotiation Dialogues

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    PRISMA augments self-training with direct preference optimization and an emotion-aware negotiation strategy chain-of-thought to produce more interpretable and effective negotiation dialogues on two new datasets.