🚨 Thrilled to share that our lab will be presenting the 🏆 Best Paper at the NExT-Game Workshop at #
ICML2026# today!
🎤 When Agents Lie: Premeditation, Persistence, and Exploitation in Repeated Games
🏆 Best Paper @ NExT-Game Workshop
📍 Conference Room S307
📅 Fri, Jul 10
🕐 13:00–13:20 KST
Authors:
@JerickShi @TerryJCZhang @bschoelkopf @conitzer @ZhijingJin
🤖 We introduce a three-stage endogenous promise protocol for repeated multi-agent games that asks not only whether LLM agents honor their public commitments when they can privately deviate, but also how model-on-model composition influences premeditated deception and persistent exploitation.
📊 Across six canonical games spanning binary and numerical action spaces, our evaluation of frontier models (GPT-5.2, Llama-4-Maverick, Claude-Opus-4.6) reveals:
🔹 Over 90% of promise-breaking instances are premeditated in agents' private plans.
🔹 Mixed-model groups with mismatched communication frameworks create systemic, persistent payoff gaps of up to 5.00 points from Round 0.
📄 Paper:
#
MultiAgentSystems# #
LLMs# #
GameTheory# #
AI# #
ICML2026#