Flag Game: A Toy Model for Mechanistic Swarm Interpretability
Flag Game models collective belief formation in multi-agent systems, revealing belief collapse, polarization, and attribution techniques for swarm interpretability.
The paper introduces the Flag Game, a toy model where bounded agents observe only private crops of a hidden country flag and exchange beliefs while weighing social evidence. It reproduces non-monotonic performance scaling with population size, collective belief collapse at small populations, and polarization at large ones that drives performance decline. The authors propose social circuit attribution with causal agent-patching interventions, and a statistical-mechanical theory that matches the empirical phase diagram, as first steps toward mechanistic swarm interpretability for collective alignment.