We propose incentive-aligned mechanisms for in-context credit assignment: the task of assigning credit for AI-generated content (e.g. code, news articles, short-form videos) among creators whose intellectual property appears in the context window. Our approach is based on the least core solution concept from cooperative game theory, which distributes value in a way that is as stable as possible by ensuring that no subset of creators is significantly under-compensated relative to the value they could generate on their own. We develop algorithms for approximating the least core, which leverage novel routines for constraint seeding and constraint separation. On a web retrieval credit assignment task, we find that our approaches are capable of approximating the least core using orders of magnitude fewer LLM calls compared to alternative methods.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.06920,
title = {In-Context Credit Assignment via the Core},
author = {Keegan Harris and Siddharth Prasad and Asher Trockman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.06920},
year = {2026}
}