Talk is Cheap, Communication is Hard: Dynamic Grounding Failures and Repair in Multi-Agent Negotiation
Grounding is the collaborative process of establishing mutual belief sufficient for a communicative goal. While static grounding maps language to a shared context, dynamic grounding requires agents to negotiate meaning across turns. Current multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) benchmarks largely emphasize static, one-shot tasks, overlooking whether agents can repair grounding breakdowns through interaction. We introduce an iterated multi-turn negotiation game where two agents allocate shared resources to private projects with verifiable jointly optimal outcomes. Although individual agents can identify Pareto-optimal allocations in isolation, agent dyads consistently fail to reach them a...
| Authors | Yiheng Yao, Chelsea Zou, Robert D. Hawkins |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 3 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 May 2026 |
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