Mar 10, 2025

LLM Military Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Simulation Study

Ashley Meader, Mingli Che, Shun Yoshizawa, Yingquan Li

Details

Details

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Summary

LLMs tested in military decision scenarios typically favor diplomacy over conflict, though uncertainty and chain-of-thought reasoning increase aggressive recommendations. This suggests context-specific limitations for LLM-based military decision support.

Cite this work:

@misc {

title={

LLM Military Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Simulation Study

},

author={

Ashley Meader, Mingli Che, Shun Yoshizawa, Yingquan Li

},

date={

3/10/25

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

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Anna Leshinskaya

This project examines responses of LLMs to scenarios with different levels of uncertainty, and different types of uncertainty, with respect to "conflict severity" or "escalation" of their responses. While this is an interesting and empirically tractable question, I see a few areas of improvement to the theoretical basis and the operationalization of measures.

- The theoretical background motivating the hypothesis that uncertainty should lead to conflict escalation is not described, making it unclear what the theoretical impact of the findings would be. It is also unclear how hallucination relates to uncertainty perception. Thus, the introduction lacks some cohesion.

- Issues with validation of the IV. More scenarios should be included as well how the manipulation of their level and type of uncertainty was validated. Were these done by humans? Was it defined by systematic manipulation of objective variables by the researchers? How were the levels controlled in other respects, for example in terms of harms, violence, negative affect, or other relevant features?

- Validation of the DV. Relatedly, the operationalization of the dependent measure could be better described. ie., how is this scale of responses validated? How was this scale developed and how do we know what it means? What is a 'severe' response? How does that relate to the notion of "escalation"? How was this scoring performed exactly? How were raters instructed? Do other raters agree with each other?

- The "qualitative insights" noted regarding "diplomatic approaches" could easily be quantified with a rating scale. This would allow for stronger conclusions.

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This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.