Beyond Survival: Evaluating LLMs in Social Deduction Games with Human-Aligned Strategies
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Abstract (arXiv)
Social deduction games like Werewolf combine language, reasoning, and strategy, providing a testbed for studying natural language and social intelligence. However, most studies reduce the game to LLM-based self-play, yielding templated utterances and anecdotal cases that overlook the richness of social gameplay. Evaluation further relies on coarse metrics such as survival time or subjective scoring due to the lack of quality reference data. To address these gaps, we curate a high-quality, human-verified multimodal Werewolf dataset containing over 100 hours of video, 32.4M utterance tokens, and 15 rule variants. Based on this dataset, we propose a novel strategy-alignment evaluation that leverages the winning faction's strategies as ground truth in two stages: 1) Speech evaluation, formulated as multiple-choice-style tasks that assess whether the model can adopt appropriate stances across five dimensions of social ability; and 2) Decision evaluation, which assesses the model's voting choices and opponent-role inferences. This framework enables a fine-grained evaluation of models' linguistic and reasoning capabilities, while capturing their ability to generate strategically coherent gameplay. Our experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs show diverse performance, with roughly half remain below 0.50, revealing clear gaps in deception and counterfactual reasoning. We hope our dataset further inspires research on language, reasoning, and strategy in multi-agent interaction.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 16 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.
Builds on
16 of 34 references.
References · 16
- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
- 2025gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Cardcited by 1,258
- 2023Exploring Large Language Models for Communication Games: An Empirical Study on Werewolfcited by 238
- 2023Language Agents with Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Play in the Werewolf Gamecited by 148
- 2025Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 47
- 2024Enhance Reasoning for Large Language Models in the Game Werewolfcited by 44
- 2024Werewolf Arena: A Case Study in LLM Evaluation via Social Deductioncited by 42
- 2024AMONGAGENTS: Evaluating Large Language Models in the Interactive Text-Based Social Deduction Gamecited by 26
- 2024The Stepwise Deception: Simulating the Evolution from True News to Fake News with LLM Agentscited by 24
- 2023CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistantscited by 23
- 2023Playing the Werewolf game with artificial intelligence for language understandingcited by 16
- 2025Audio Jailbreak: An Open Comprehensive Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 15
4 more
- 2023Long-Horizon Dialogue Understanding for Role Identification in the Game of Avalon with Large Language Modelscited by 12
- 2024Helmsman of the Masses? Evaluate the Opinion Leadership of Large Language Models in the Werewolf Gamecited by 12
- 2021RLupus: Cooperation through emergent communication in The Werewolf social deduction gamecited by 10
- 2022Hidden Agenda: a Social Deduction Game with Diverse Learned Equilibriacited by 6
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.
9 papers.
- 2026MINDGAMES: A Live Arena for Evaluating Social and Strategic Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLMscited by 5
- 2026QUACK: Questioning, Understanding, and Auditing Communicated Knowledge in Multimodal Social Deduction Agentscited by 3
- 2026Towards Generalist Game Players: An Investigation of Foundation Models in the Game Multiversecited by 2
- 2026Self-Awareness before Action: Mitigating Logical Inertia via Proactive Cognitive Awarenesscited by 1
- 2026Multicultural Spyfall: Assessing LLMs through Dynamic Multilingual Social Deduction Gamecited by 0
- 2026Cooperate to Compete: Strategic Coordination in Multi-Agent Conquestcited by 0
- 2026Avalon-ToM-Bench: Evaluating Fine-Grained Theory of Mind via Asymmetric Game Mechanicscited by 0
- 2026EVAR: Evidence-Validated Hypothesis Admission for Budget-Aware Narrative Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Do MLLM Judges Judge the Edit? Auditing Bias in Image Editing Evaluation with Verified Quality Preservationcited by 0
- 2026Do MLLM Judges Judge the Edit? Auditing Bias in Image Editing Evaluation with Verified Quality Preservation1 Oct 2026
- 2026EVAR: Evidence-Validated Hypothesis Admission for Budget-Aware Narrative Reasoning30 Aug 2026
- 2026Avalon-ToM-Bench: Evaluating Fine-Grained Theory of Mind via Asymmetric Game Mechanics10 Aug 2026
- 2026MINDGAMES: A Live Arena for Evaluating Social and Strategic Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLMs28 May 2026
- 2026QUACK: Questioning, Understanding, and Auditing Communicated Knowledge in Multimodal Social Deduction Agents26 May 2026
- 2026Towards Generalist Game Players: An Investigation of Foundation Models in the Game Multiverse11 May 2026
- 2026Cooperate to Compete: Strategic Coordination in Multi-Agent Conquest28 Apr 2026
- 2026Self-Awareness before Action: Mitigating Logical Inertia via Proactive Cognitive Awareness22 Apr 2026
- 2026Multicultural Spyfall: Assessing LLMs through Dynamic Multilingual Social Deduction Game13 Jan 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Verbal Werewolf: Engage Users with Verbalized Agentic Werewolf Game Framework
- 2024Fine-Grained and Thematic Evaluation of LLMs in Social Deduction Game
- 2025WereWolf-Plus: An Update of Werewolf Game setting Based on DSGBench
- 2026Do LLMs Trust the Accuser or the Accusation? Measuring Belief Shifts in Werewolf
- 2026Communicate-Predict-Act: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Agents
- 2025MultiMind: Enhancing Werewolf Agents with Multimodal Reasoning and Theory of Mind
- 2025LLMs Judge Themselves: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Human-Aligned Evaluation
- 2025DVM: Towards Controllable LLM Agents in Social Deduction Games