{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/measuring-free-form-decision-making","title":"Measuring Free-Form Decision-Making Inconsistency of Language Models in Military Crisis Simulations","arxiv_id":"2410.13204","date":"2024-10-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Aryan Shrivastava","Jessica Hullman","Max Lamparth"],"abstract":"There is an increasing interest in using language models (LMs) for automated decision-making, with multiple countries actively testing LMs to aid in military crisis decision-making. To scrutinize relying on LM decision-making in high-stakes settings, we examine the inconsistency of responses in a crisis simulation (\"wargame\"), similar to reported tests conducted by the US military. Prior work illustrated escalatory tendencies and varying levels of aggression among LMs but were constrained to simulations with pre-defined actions. This was due to the challenges associated with quantitatively measuring semantic differences and evaluating natural language decision-making without relying on pre-defined actions. In this work, we query LMs for free form responses and use a metric based on BERTScore to measure response inconsistency quantitatively. Leveraging the benefits of BERTScore, we show that the inconsistency metric is robust to linguistic variations that preserve semantic meaning in a question-answering setting across text lengths. We show that all five tested LMs exhibit levels of inconsistency that indicate semantic differences, even when adjusting the wargame setting, anonymizing involved conflict countries, or adjusting the sampling temperature parameter $T$. Further qualitative evaluation shows that models recommend courses of action that share few to no similarities. We also study the impact of different prompt sensitivity variations on inconsistency at temperature $T = 0$. We find that inconsistency due to semantically equivalent prompt variations can exceed response inconsistency from temperature sampling for most studied models across different levels of ablations. Given the high-stakes nature of military deployment, we recommend further consideration be taken before using LMs to inform military decisions or other cases of high-stakes decision-making.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13204v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13204v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"measuring-free-form-decision-making","repo_url":"https://github.com/aashrivastava/llmwargaminginconsistency","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"form","task_name":"Form"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.13204","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.13204"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/aashrivastava/llmwargaminginconsistency","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"ee52c518f54f1521","entry":"bootstrap_mean","repo":"aashrivastava/llmwargaminginconsistency","repo_kind":"official","path":"utils/bootstrap.py","file_url":"https://github.com/aashrivastava/llmwargaminginconsistency/blob/HEAD/utils/bootstrap.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ee52c518f54f1521"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"94068e39a4260ffd","entry":"bootstrap_percent_over","repo":"aashrivastava/llmwargaminginconsistency","repo_kind":"official","path":"utils/bootstrap.py","file_url":"https://github.com/aashrivastava/llmwargaminginconsistency/blob/HEAD/utils/bootstrap.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"94068e39a4260ffd"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}