The deception is natural because it follows from a prompt explaining the game rules and objectives, as opposed to explicitly demanding the LLM lie or putting it under conditional situations. Here are the prompts, which just state the objective of the agent.
Also, the safety techniques we evaluated might work for superficial reasons rather than substantive ones (such as just predicting based on the model’s internalization of the tokens “crewmate” and “impostor”)...we think this is a good proxy for agents in the future naturally realizing that being deceptive in certain situations would help achieve their goals.
I suspect that this is strongly confounded by there being lots of info about Among Us in the training data which makes it clear that the typical strategy for impostors is to lie and deceive.
I think you could make this work much stronger by replacing use of ‘Among Us’-specific terms (the name of the game, the names of the impostor & crewmate roles, and other identifying features) with unrelated terms. It seems like most of that could be handled with simple search & replace (it might be tougher to replace the spaceship setting with something else, but the 80⁄20 version could skip that). I think it would especially strengthen it if you replaced the name of the impostor and crewmate roles with something neutral—‘role a’ and ‘role b’, say. Replacing the ‘kill’ action with ‘tag out’ might be good as well.
Very cool work!
I suspect that this is strongly confounded by there being lots of info about Among Us in the training data which makes it clear that the typical strategy for impostors is to lie and deceive.
I think you could make this work much stronger by replacing use of ‘Among Us’-specific terms (the name of the game, the names of the impostor & crewmate roles, and other identifying features) with unrelated terms. It seems like most of that could be handled with simple search & replace (it might be tougher to replace the spaceship setting with something else, but the 80⁄20 version could skip that). I think it would especially strengthen it if you replaced the name of the impostor and crewmate roles with something neutral—‘role a’ and ‘role b’, say. Replacing the ‘kill’ action with ‘tag out’ might be good as well.
Thanks! Yep, makes sense—that’s one of the things we’ll be working on and hope to share some results soon!