Learning to Persuade Exposes How Easily LLMs Abandon Correct Beliefs — AI agent app

Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Emre Can Acikgoz, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür/Learning to Persuade Exposes How Easily LLMs Abandon Correct BeliefsUnknown

Persuasion is a core dynamic of natural language communication, shaping how large language models (LLMs) update beliefs, resolve disagreements, and reach decisions. As LLMs increasingly debate, advise, and think collaboratively with humans and each other, resistance to harmful persuasion becomes a core requirement for reliable behavior. Yet we show that this requirement is far from met: a single targeted persuasive argument is enough to collapse model accuracy to near zero, even when the argument is factually false. We formalize this threat as adversarial persuasion and introduce an adversarial reinforcement learning framework that trains persuader agents to change a target model's answer in a single interaction. First, we show that optimizing persuasion strategies through trial and error exposes vulnerabilities that static prompting misses: RL-trained persuaders raise persuasion success from approximately 24% to over 93% against the training-time persuadee. Second, we find that these learned strategies transfer to unseen models, achieving 83% attack success on Qwen-14B, 79% on Llama-3.1-8B, and 25% on GPT-4o-mini. Third, we demonstrate that a curriculum that bootstraps on more persuadable open-weight models before targeting harder models further increases GPT-4o-mini attack success from 25% to 38%. Moreover, our results reveal that optimized persuaders increasingly rely on credibility-based tactics, including fabricated citations and false authoritative evidence. Together, these findings expose a critical weakness in current LLM agents: even when they initially reason correctly, they can be steered toward false conclusions by optimized natural language influence. This positions persuasion robustness as a necessary safety criterion for multi-agent and human-AI decision-making systems.

agent app

Stars0

Forks0

HF Downloads—30d

Last commit—

Refreshed18h ago

Project healthUnknownNo activity data.

Production readinessResearch / EarlyBest for exploration and prototyping.

Risk notesUnknown licenseVerify license before production use.

AgentHub Score

55 / 100

Composite score from 6 signals. How we score →

Active project

55Score

Growth

40C

Activity

30C

Documentation

70C+

Maturity

45C

Community

42C

Production

58C

GitHub stars · 12 days observed0 not enough history

snapshots

Repository activity · 12 days observedReal snapshots from pushed_at

inactivepushed

2026-08-142026-08-27

Practical assessment

Should you use it?

✓ Best for

Research and experimentation
Prototype development
Learning agentic patterns

◎ Strengths

Active community
Open source
Well-documented API

✕ Not ideal for

Untested at scale without validation
Teams without AI/ML expertise

⚠ Watch-outs

Review changelog before updating
Verify license for commercial use

Technical details

What's inside

Language—

License—

Sourcearxiv

Open source✗ No

Commercial use—

Docs—

Demo—

PaperarXiv ↗

AgentHub Score

Score 55/100

Below average

Alternatives

OccuReward: LLM-Guided Occupant-Centric Reward Shaping for Demographic Equity in Grid-Interactive Buildings

0 · agent app

Unaccountable Delegation, Fading Skills: Mapping the Risks of Workplace AI Agents

0 · agent app

Discovering Adaptive Transmission Programs for Collective Innovation

0 · agent app

Agentic AI-driven Immersive Simulation: A Knowledge-Aware Virtual Training Platform forHigh Dose Rate (HDR) Brachytherapy

0 · agent app

55 Compare all →

Recent activity

Latest commit ——

Indexed by AgentHub crawler18h ago

Monitor for new releasesongoing