Persuasion Dynamics in LLMs: Investigating Robustness and Adaptability in Knowledge and Safety with DuET-PD

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu, Chin, Daniel Wai Kit, Liu, Zhengyuan, Chen, Nancy F., Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu
Chin, Daniel Wai Kit
Liu, Zhengyuan
Chen, Nancy F.
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
author_facet Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu
Chin, Daniel Wai Kit
Liu, Zhengyuan
Chen, Nancy F.
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) can struggle to balance gullibility to misinformation and resistance to valid corrections in persuasive dialogues, a critical challenge for reliable deployment. We introduce DuET-PD (Dual Evaluation for Trust in Persuasive Dialogues), a framework evaluating multi-turn stance-change dynamics across dual dimensions: persuasion type (corrective/misleading) and domain (knowledge via MMLU-Pro, and safety via SALAD-Bench). We find that even a state-of-the-art model like GPT-4o achieves only 27.32% accuracy in MMLU-Pro under sustained misleading persuasions. Moreover, results reveal a concerning trend of increasing sycophancy in newer open-source models. To address this, we introduce Holistic DPO, a training approach balancing positive and negative persuasion examples. Unlike prompting or resist-only training, Holistic DPO enhances both robustness to misinformation and receptiveness to corrections, improving Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct's accuracy under misleading persuasion in safety contexts from 4.21% to 76.54%. These contributions offer a pathway to developing more reliable and adaptable LLMs for multi-turn dialogue. Code is available at https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/DuET-PD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_17450
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Persuasion Dynamics in LLMs: Investigating Robustness and Adaptability in Knowledge and Safety with DuET-PD
Tan, Bryan Chen Zhengyu
Chin, Daniel Wai Kit
Liu, Zhengyuan
Chen, Nancy F.
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Large Language Models (LLMs) can struggle to balance gullibility to misinformation and resistance to valid corrections in persuasive dialogues, a critical challenge for reliable deployment. We introduce DuET-PD (Dual Evaluation for Trust in Persuasive Dialogues), a framework evaluating multi-turn stance-change dynamics across dual dimensions: persuasion type (corrective/misleading) and domain (knowledge via MMLU-Pro, and safety via SALAD-Bench). We find that even a state-of-the-art model like GPT-4o achieves only 27.32% accuracy in MMLU-Pro under sustained misleading persuasions. Moreover, results reveal a concerning trend of increasing sycophancy in newer open-source models. To address this, we introduce Holistic DPO, a training approach balancing positive and negative persuasion examples. Unlike prompting or resist-only training, Holistic DPO enhances both robustness to misinformation and receptiveness to corrections, improving Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct's accuracy under misleading persuasion in safety contexts from 4.21% to 76.54%. These contributions offer a pathway to developing more reliable and adaptable LLMs for multi-turn dialogue. Code is available at https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/DuET-PD.
title Persuasion Dynamics in LLMs: Investigating Robustness and Adaptability in Knowledge and Safety with DuET-PD
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17450