arXiv AI

Algorithmic Impact Reveals the Hidden Social Choice Structure of Alignment

The paper reinterprets AI alignment as a social choice problem, framing it as linear optimization over a convex impact space. This approach links alignment protocols to welfare outcomes, enabling the use of welfare economics and mechanism design tools. The authors demonstrate strategyproof, unanimous mechanisms like voting-by-issues and random-dictatorship, and derive alignment protocols that maximize utilitarian welfare while respecting harm constraints, validated on real human preference data.

arXiv AI
Oct 27

Jointly Modeling Preferences and Imperfect Decision-Making in Large Language Models

The paper introduces the Preference-Behavior Model (PBM), which jointly infers Large Language Model (LLM) preferences and imperfect decision-making mechanisms from observed choices. By applying PBM to three social dilemma games—Public Goods, Collective-Risk, and Common-Pool Resource—the authors show that preferences derived from one dilemma can predict behavior in others, whereas traditional behavioral economic elicitation instruments fail to do so consistently. The study also evaluates how well inferred preferences align with persona instructions, revealing both broad agreement and specific divergences across dimensions, LLMs, and games.

By Axel Abels, Elias Fern\'andez Domingos, Tom Lenaerts
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Robust Nash Alignment under Preference Uncertainty

Robust Nash Alignment introduces a game-theoretic framework that seeks a policy with a high worst-case win rate against both an adversarial competitor and any preference kernel within an ambiguity set around a nominal preference. The authors propose a four-player primal-dual proxy game and an optimistic mirror descent-ascent algorithm to efficiently optimize this robust objective, proving convergence guarantees and demonstrating improved performance in controlled tabular games and LLM alignment experiments.

By Shihab Ahmed, Debamita Ghosh, David Tang, Yudan Wang, Alvaro Velasquez, Yue Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

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.

By Yanan Cai, Zhongrui Zhao, Zhigang Lu, Ickjai Lee, Wei Emma Zhang, Minhui Xue, Yihong Zhang, Shuchao Pang, Wei Xiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

To Go Far, Go Together: Diverse Preferences Induce a Curriculum for Reward Optimization

The paper introduces CurriPO, a tree‑structured curriculum that automatically adapts to diverse user reward models in AI alignment tasks. By exploiting the natural hierarchy between easy‑ and hard‑to‑optimize reward models, CurriPO covers a broad user population in a single traversal, reusing previously incorporated reward models. Experiments on personalized continuous control show that CurriPO improves population satisfaction by 1.2–2.1× over the strongest baseline while cutting training time and better serving users traditionally underserved by conventional optimization.

By Taehyung Kim, Jongeun Choi