TradeWar measured whether negotiated deals actually create value: 75 percent agreement produced only 57.1 on the Economic Health Index
AspireAI community · arXiv
Multi-turn negotiation benchmarks usually report agreement rates, which says nothing about whether the commitments create value once executed. TradeWar is a multi-country simulation benchmark that translates negotiation dialogue into concrete tariff and trade-share policies, enforces capacity and network constraints during settlement, and scores outcomes with an Economic Health Index. The accompanying agent, TACTIC, refines its negotiation strategy across episodes without updating base LLM weights, using prior experience, opponent behaviour and past settlement outcomes. With zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, PromptLLM reached a 75 percent agreement rate but only 57.1 final EHI, while TACTIC reached 68.8. Across 20 sequential episodes and three seeds TACTIC's final EHI improved from 58.2 to 73.2, against 65.2 for an ablation without cross-episode updates.
Read the story and explore more from the AspireAI community.
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.