"Don't Say It!": Constraints, Compliance, and Communication when Language Models Play Taboo
The game of Taboo requires describing a target word without using a set of forbidden words, so that other players can guess it. This deceptively simple task combines strict lexical constraints with the need for communicatively effective descriptions, making it a compelling playground for examining how LLMs navigate competing demands at inference time. We evaluate two open-weight models under conditions that intervene at progressively deeper levels of the generative process, from prompting to generation-time constraints to internal representations manipulations. We assess their outputs through forbidden word violation detection, LLM-as-a-judge measuring the degree to which generated descri...
| Authors | Sara Candussio, Francesca Padovani, Daniel Scalena et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 July 2026 |
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