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The Convention Gap: Towards Measuring Implicit Communication in Cooperative AI Evaluation

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 10, 2026 · UTC

Cooperative AI agents are evaluated against other AIs, yet human cooperation relies on implicit conventions -- shared protocols for reading meaning beyond the literal message -- which AI-AI benchmarks may not capture. We propose the convention gap, the difference between the failure probability predicted from the literal content of communication and the observed failure rate, as a metric of implicit communication. In the card game Hanabi, the finite deck and deterministic hint constraints make this posterior exactly computable. We replayed about 101,000 play actions from three public datasets

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First collected: 2026-09-20T19:02:05.452Z. This is not the publication date.