Flout at Your Own Risk: LLMs Struggle with Pragmatic Cooperativity Under Epistemic Asymmetry
The study investigated how LLMs handle collaborative tasks with incomplete information (epistemic asymmetry) using a jigsaw puzzle simulation. Researchers found that while prompting and post-training can help, LLMs still struggle with pragmatic communication when information is missing. Specific failures correlate with the LLM flouting Grice's conversational maxims, indicating a lack of true cooperative reasoning in these settings.