Do LLMs Trust the Accuser or the Accusation? Measuring Belief Shifts in Werewolf
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate
Abstract (arXiv)
Social-deduction games such as Werewolf are increasingly used to evaluate LLM agents, but existing evaluations often rely on final game outcomes. We propose a belief-shift evaluation benchmark in Werewolf for analyzing communication skills through belief updating. Using LLM-played games, we annotate suspicion and accusation messages and measure how an observing village-side model's beliefs change after each message. We evaluate 40 open-weight LLM configurations on 1,224 annotated messages. Our results show that larger models better distinguish true wolves from villagers based on game history, but accusations still strongly influence their beliefs. Models become more suspicious of the accused target and less suspicious of the accuser, especially when the accuser is trusted, even if the accuser is wolf-aligned. Larger models better resist accusations from accusers they already distrust. Overall, our findings suggest that current open-weight LLMs up to 120B parameters still struggle to integrate accusation content with source trust in strategic communication. Our benchmark and code are available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/werewolf-accusation-benchmark.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2026.
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14 of 25 references.
References · 14
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,988
- 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,848
- 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,395
- 2025Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAscited by 521
- 2025Humanity's Last Examcited by 491
- 2023Exploring Large Language Models for Communication Games: An Empirical Study on Werewolfcited by 241
- 2023Understanding Social Reasoning in Language Models with Language Modelscited by 172
- 2023FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in Interactionscited by 171
- 2023Language Agents with Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Play in the Werewolf Gamecited by 152
- 2023The Earth is Flat because...: Investigating LLMs' Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversationcited by 109
- 2025Learning Strategic Language Agents in the Werewolf Game with Iterative Latent Space Policy Optimizationcited by 15
- 2025Persuasion Dynamics in LLMs: Investigating Robustness and Adaptability in Knowledge and Safety with DuET-PDcited by 13
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- 2024Helmsman of the Masses? Evaluate the Opinion Leadership of Large Language Models in the Werewolf Game
- 2026MafiaScope: Non-Invasive, Time-Resolved Belief Probing for LLM Agents in Social Deduction Games
- 2026Can Agents Deceive? Evaluating Reasoning and Deception in ParliamentBench using a Social Deduction Game
- 2024An Implementation of Werewolf Agent That does not Truly Trust LLMs