arXiv Computation and Language

AI Alignment through a Game-theoretic Lens: A Survey

The article surveys AI alignment from a game-theoretic perspective, focusing on how large language models and AI agents can be aligned with complex human values in high-risk settings. It categorizes recent progress around key game-theoretic elements and addresses three main challenges: preference diversity, alignment priority, and temporal dynamics. The survey clarifies where game theory benefits current alignment methods, where its application is looser, and what remains to be tackled for robust, adaptive, and verifiable AI systems.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Align AI to Dynamic Human-AI Workflows

arXiv:2607. 14240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current alignment approaches typically focus on emulating human behavior using static representations of human preferences, failing to capture the dynamic, context-dependent nature of real-world human-AI interactions.

By Valerie Chen, Cleotilde Gonzalez, Anita Williams Woolley, Michael Lee, Tongshuang Wu, Vincent Conitzer, Aarti Singh
arXiv AI
Sep 28

GT-HarmBench: Benchmarking AI Safety Risks Through the Lens of Game Theory

GT-HarmBench is a benchmark that evaluates AI safety risks in multi-agent settings, covering 1,535 high-stakes scenarios based on game-theoretic structures like the Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt, and Chicken. The benchmark draws scenarios from realistic AI risk contexts in the MIT AI Risk Repository and tests 15 frontier models, finding that agents fail to choose socially beneficial actions in 38% of cases, including military escalation, election manipulation, and medical malpractice. The study also measures how prompt framing and ordering affect outcomes and shows that game-theoretic interventions can improve socially beneficial outcomes by up to 18%.

By Pepijn Cobben, Xuanqiang Angelo Huang, Thao Amelia Pham, Isabel Dahlgren, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Zhijing Jin
arXiv AI
Sep 3

TUX: Measuring Human--AI Tacit Understanding

The paper introduces TUX, a Tacit Understanding Index that measures how similarly humans and large language models (LLMs) place concepts along subjective spectra in a task inspired by the game Wavelength. Using 241 human participants and 200 profile-conditioned LLM agents across four models, the study finds that human–agent pairs with similar traits achieve higher TUX scores, indicating that tacit alignment is linked to person-level characteristics. Regression analyses show that richer predictor sets—including individual traits, decision-making styles, and confidence—improve the explainability of TUX beyond simple trait-distance baselines.

By Yueshen Li, Hanyi Min, Vedant Das Swain, Koustuv Saha