First open benchmark measuring how willingly agents propagate costly information through a population under time uncertainty.
First open benchmark measuring how willingly agents propagate costly information through a population under time uncertainty.
Project Details
Updated 07/12/26 · Provided via application · VerifiedInformation propagation is a double-edge characteristic. This can be as a warning, a norm, a coordination signal, as a jailbreak or malicious code. Additional challenge that agents may not be able distinguish. However, any transmission is costly, so every agent has to decide if sharing worth the candle. Therefore we study content-agnostic willingness to share or rather free-ride.
The design: a repeated game. A population, some agents know secret information, some don't. Each round every agent score points equal to the number of correct answers this round. This creates an incentive for sharing, however sharing costs points. Agents don't know how many rounds the game will last so they have to make a decision between one-moment personal lose and long term win for everybody or free-ride. This tests long term orientation, pro-social behaviour, not just calculation.
The project is already been tested. We have a working prototype (code): https://github.com/xImDoctor/propagate-bench . Preliminary single round results for Qwen3-235B, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, gpt-oss 20b already show very distinct behaviour for these models including (preliminary) strong irrationality (DeepSeek) and diffusion of responsibility (Qwen): (google doc) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v_0ujCl7n5mg1oimPqIVuMZ1gMgJN-2jxb0OM8xI3Jg/edit?usp=sharing
What the grant buys: statistic, single round -> many rounds runs (diffusion speed, free-rider profiles, reciprocal "you teach next" deals once dialogue is on), stronger models (including proprietary), human hours, open-source benchmark, paper, LW article ... .
Theory of Impact
Updated 07/17/26 · By grantmaking.aiQuantitative reusable measure on how fast information may spread through agents population. This provides insight on stability/inertia of population in long horizon. It can become an early-warning system for malicious information spreading and give us time estimations on how fast it can be especially in mixed populations which may saturate fast.
To our knowledge, there are currently no benchmarks which would isolate costly information propagation under time uncertainty as a single measurable metric. There are research which study social norm formation or rich worlds but we intentionally strip it to a single effect so it yields clean compatible metrics.
People
Updated 07/17/26 · By grantmaking.aiTeam Member
This seems like an interesting, well-bounded and useful study.