arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Do LLMs Trust the Accuser or the Accusation? Measuring Belief Shifts in Werewolf

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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2609.12446 (cs)
[Submitted on 11 Sep 2026]

Title:Do LLMs Trust the Accuser or the Accusation? Measuring Belief Shifts in Werewolf

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Abstract: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 this https URL.
Comments: Accepted by the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026 Main Conference)
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.12446 [cs.AI]
  (or arXiv:2609.12446v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.12446
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Yu-Yu Yang [view email]
[v1] Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:10:00 UTC (334 KB)
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