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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026Bellevue, Washington

Rotating verifier partners in DeepSeek-V4-Flash: an inconclusive 8-point drop in acceptance

Venkata Anirudh Devireddy

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Rotating verifier partners in DeepSeek-V4-Flash: an inconclusive 8-point drop in acceptance

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In Shi, Zhang and Yang (2026), fixed pairs of LLM agents end up accepting each other's work when they verify each other, even though REJECT is the only compliant action. For DeepSeek-V4-Flash, I test how much of this depends on meeting the same partner every episode. I keep the original environment, vary only the partners, and run three conditions: ten fixed partner pairs; the same agents rotated so no pair meets more than once; and a scripted partner that always rejects. I predicted that rotating partners would change acceptance by less than 15 points. Fixed pairs (partners) accept 81.0% of the time and rotated pairs (strangers) 73.0%. The difference is +8.0 points (nominal 95% CI +1.0 to +16.0, 10 task slots). This meets neither pre-registered decision rule, so it is inconclusive. Even against a scripted partner that always rejects, the model accepts 63.0% of the time. Mutual ACCEPT between partners is 76.0%, compared with 83.0% in the released data, which clears the pre-set replication gate. The intervals are descriptive: agents in the rotating population have linked interaction histories, so its slots are not independent.

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Cite this project

@misc{devireddy2026rotating,
  title = {{Rotating verifier partners in DeepSeek-V4-Flash: an inconclusive 8-point drop in acceptance}},
  author = {Venkata Anirudh Devireddy},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/rotating-verifier-partners-in-deepseekv4flash-an-inconclusive-8point-drop-in-acceptance-a5su}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/rotating-verifier-partners-in-deepseekv4flash-an-inconclusive-8point-drop-in-acceptance-a5su}
}

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