The Convention Gap: Beyond Literal Content in Human-AI Cooperation
arXiv:2609.11489v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cooperative AI agents are often evaluated against other AIs, yet human cooperation is thought to rely on implicit conventions: shared rules for reading meaning beyond the literal message. We propose the convention gap as a diagnostic of such implicit communication. In the card game Hanabi, where hints are the only messages about one's own hand, the convention gap is the failure probability predicted exactly from the literal content of the hint…