Peilin Zhao


2026

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown remarkable progress in social deduction games (SDGs). However, existing approaches primarily focus on information processing and strategy selection, overlooking the significance of persuasive communication in influencing other players’ beliefs and responses. In SDGs, success depends not only on making correct deductions but also on convincing others to respond in alignment with one’s intent. To address this limitation, we formalize turn-based dialogue in SDGs as a Stackelberg competition, where the current player acts as the leader who strategically influences the follower’s response. Building on this theoretical foundation, we propose a reinforcement learning framework that trains agents to optimize utterances for persuasive impact. Through comprehensive experiments across four diverse social deduction benchmarks, we demonstrate that our agents significantly outperform baselines. This work represents a significant step toward developing AI agents capable of strategic social influence, with implications extending to scenarios requiring persuasive communication. Our code and data are available at https://3dagentworld.github.io/leader_follower.
Reward models trained through Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) methods frequently suffer from limited generalizability, which hinders the alignment performance of policy models. This challenge stems from various issues, including distribution shift, preference label noise, and mismatch of overly challenging samples with model capacity. In this paper, we aim to enhance the generalizability of reward models through a data-centric approach, driven by the insight that these issues are inherently intertwined from a uniform perspective of data difficulty. Accordingly, we propose a novel framework, Curriculum-RLAIF, which constructs preference pairs with varying difficulty levels and then produces a specific curriculum for reward model training. Comprehensive experimental results suggest that reward models trained with Curriculum-RLAIF achieve improved generalizability, boosting the alignment performance of policy models by a significant margin without incurring additional inference costs compared to various existing non-curriculum baselines. Further analysis and comparison with alternative strategies highlight the superiority of Curriculum-RLAIF in simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

2024

Text watermarking has emerged as a pivotal technique for identifying machine-generated text. However, existing methods often rely on arbitrary vocabulary partitioning during decoding to embed watermarks, which compromises the availability of suitable tokens and significantly degrades the quality of responses. This study assesses the impact of watermarking on different capabilities of large language models (LLMs) from a cognitive science lens. Our finding highlights a significant disparity; knowledge recall and logical reasoning are more adversely affected than language generation. These results suggest a more profound effect of watermarking on LLMs than previously understood. To address these challenges, we introduce Watermarking with Mutual Exclusion (WatME), a novel approach leveraging linguistic prior knowledge of inherent lexical redundancy in LLM vocabularies to seamlessly integrate watermarks. Specifically, WatME dynamically optimizes token usage during the decoding process by applying a mutually exclusive rule to the identified lexical redundancies. This strategy effectively prevents the unavailability of appropriate tokens and preserves the expressive power of LLMs. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence showing that WatME effectively preserves the diverse capabilities of LLMs while ensuring watermark detectability.
This paper explores the open research problem of understanding the social behaviors of LLM-based agents. Using Avalon as a testbed, we employ system prompts to guide LLM agents in gameplay. While previous studies have touched on gameplay with LLM agents, research on their social behaviors is lacking. We propose a novel framework, tailored for Avalon, features a multi-agent system facilitating efficient communication and interaction. We evaluate its performance based on game success and analyze LLM agents’ social behaviors. Results affirm the framework’s effectiveness in creating adaptive agents and suggest LLM-based agents’ potential in navigating dynamic social interactions. By examining collaboration and confrontation behaviors, we offer insights into this field’s research and applications.

2016