Learning to Lie: Reinforcement Learning Attacks Damage Human-AI Teams and Teams of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Musaffar, Abed Kareem, Gokhale, Anand, Zeng, Sirui, Tadayon, Rasta, Yan, Xifeng, Singh, Ambuj, Bullo, Francesco
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Musaffar, Abed Kareem
Gokhale, Anand
Zeng, Sirui
Tadayon, Rasta
Yan, Xifeng
Singh, Ambuj
Bullo, Francesco
author_facet Musaffar, Abed Kareem
Gokhale, Anand
Zeng, Sirui
Tadayon, Rasta
Yan, Xifeng
Singh, Ambuj
Bullo, Francesco
contents As artificial intelligence (AI) assistants become more widely adopted in safety-critical domains, it becomes important to develop safeguards against potential failures or adversarial attacks. A key prerequisite to developing these safeguards is understanding the ability of these AI assistants to mislead human teammates. We investigate this attack problem within the context of an intellective strategy game where a team of three humans and one AI assistant collaborate to answer a series of trivia questions. Unbeknownst to the humans, the AI assistant is adversarial. Leveraging techniques from Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), the AI assistant learns a model of the humans' trust evolution and uses that model to manipulate the group decision-making process to harm the team. We evaluate two models -- one inspired by literature and the other data-driven -- and find that both can effectively harm the human team. Moreover, we find that in this setting our data-driven model is capable of accurately predicting how human agents appraise their teammates given limited information on prior interactions. Finally, we compare the performance of state-of-the-art LLM models to human agents on our influence allocation task to evaluate whether the LLMs allocate influence similarly to humans or if they are more robust to our attack. These results enhance our understanding of decision-making dynamics in small human-AI teams and lay the foundation for defense strategies.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_21983
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Lie: Reinforcement Learning Attacks Damage Human-AI Teams and Teams of LLMs
Musaffar, Abed Kareem
Gokhale, Anand
Zeng, Sirui
Tadayon, Rasta
Yan, Xifeng
Singh, Ambuj
Bullo, Francesco
Human-Computer Interaction
Social and Information Networks
As artificial intelligence (AI) assistants become more widely adopted in safety-critical domains, it becomes important to develop safeguards against potential failures or adversarial attacks. A key prerequisite to developing these safeguards is understanding the ability of these AI assistants to mislead human teammates. We investigate this attack problem within the context of an intellective strategy game where a team of three humans and one AI assistant collaborate to answer a series of trivia questions. Unbeknownst to the humans, the AI assistant is adversarial. Leveraging techniques from Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), the AI assistant learns a model of the humans' trust evolution and uses that model to manipulate the group decision-making process to harm the team. We evaluate two models -- one inspired by literature and the other data-driven -- and find that both can effectively harm the human team. Moreover, we find that in this setting our data-driven model is capable of accurately predicting how human agents appraise their teammates given limited information on prior interactions. Finally, we compare the performance of state-of-the-art LLM models to human agents on our influence allocation task to evaluate whether the LLMs allocate influence similarly to humans or if they are more robust to our attack. These results enhance our understanding of decision-making dynamics in small human-AI teams and lay the foundation for defense strategies.
title Learning to Lie: Reinforcement Learning Attacks Damage Human-AI Teams and Teams of LLMs
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21983