India

We investigate factors contributing to LLM agents’ success in competitive multi-agent environments, using auctions as a testbed where agents bid to maximize profit. The agents are equipped with bidding domain knowledge, distinct personas that reflect item preferences, and a memory of auction history. Our work extends the classic auction scenario by creating a realistic environment where multiple agents bid on houses, weighing aspects such as size, location, and budget to secure the most desirable homes at the lowest prices. Particularly, we investigate three key questions: (a) How does a persona influence an agent’s behavior in a competitive setting? (b) Can an agent effectively profile its competitors’ behavior during auctions? (c) How can persona profiling be leveraged to create an advantage using strategies such as theory of mind? Through a series of experiments, we analyze the behaviors of LLM agents and shed light on new findings. Our testbed, called HARBOR, offers a valuable platform for deepening the understanding of multi-agent workflows in competitive environments.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

HARBOR: Exploring Persona Dynamics in Multi-Agent Competition

muti-agent competition

llm agents

persona

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

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The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable advancement in various NLP tasks. As such, a popular trend has emerged lately where NLP researchers extract word/sentence/document embeddings from these large decoder-only models and use them for various inference tasks with promising results. However, it is still unclear whether the performance improvement of LLM-induced embeddings is merely because of scale or whether underlying embeddings they produce significantly differ from classical encoding models like Word2Vec, GloVe, Sentence-BERT (SBERT) or Universal Sentence Encoder (USE). This is the central question we investigate in the paper by systematically comparing classical decontextualized and contextualized word embeddings with the same for LLM-induced embeddings. Our results show that LLMs cluster semantically related words more tightly and perform better on analogy tasks in decontextualized settings. However, in contextualized settings, classical models like SimCSE often outperform LLMs in sentence-level similarity assessment tasks, highlighting their continued relevance for fine-grained semantics.

Revisiting Word Embeddings in the LLM Era

Pretrained transformer-encoder models like DeBERTaV3 and ModernBERT introduce architectural advancements aimed at improving efficiency and performance. Although the authors of ModernBERT report improved performance over DeBERTaV3 on several benchmarks, the lack of disclosed training data and the absence of comparisons using a shared dataset make it difficult to determine whether these gains are due to architectural improvements or differences in training data. In this work, we conduct a controlled study by pretraining ModernBERT on the same dataset as CamemBERTaV2, a DeBERTaV3 French model, isolating the effect of model design. Our results show that the previous model generation remains superior in sample efficiency and overall benchmark performance, with ModernBERT’s primary advantage being its support for long context, faster training, and inference speed. However, the new proposed model still provides meaningful architectural improvements compared to earlier models such as BERT and RoBERTa. Additionally, we observe that high-quality pre-training data accelerates convergence but does not significantly improve final performance, suggesting potential benchmark saturation. These findings show the importance of disentangling pretraining data from architectural innovations when evaluating transformer models.

ModernBERT or DeBERTaV3? Examining Architecture and Data Influence on Transformer Encoder Models Performance

While question-answering (QA) benchmark performance is an automatic and scalable method to compare LLMs, it is an indirect method of evaluating their underlying problem-solving capabilities. Therefore, we propose a holistic and generalizable framework based on **cascaded question disclosure** that provides a more accurate estimate of the models' problem-solving capabilities while maintaining the scalability and automation. 
This approach collects model responses in a stagewise manner with each stage revealing partial information about the question designed to elicit generalized reasoning in LLMs. 
We find that our approach not only provides a better comparison between LLMs, but also induces better intermediate traces in models compared to the standard QA paradigm. 
We empirically verify this behavior on diverse reasoning and knowledge-heavy QA datasets by comparing LLMs of varying sizes and families. 
Our approach narrows the performance gap observed in the standard QA evaluation settings, indicating that the prevalent indirect QA paradigm of evaluation overestimates the differences in performance between models.
We further validate our findings by extensive ablation studies.

Cascaded Information Disclosure for Generalized Evaluation of Problem Solving Capabilities

Pretrained language and vision-language models have become core components in building vision-language-action models (VLAs) due to their strong spatial reasoning capabilities. Evaluating the robustness of VLAs is crucial to ensuring their reliability in practical scenarios. Although prior work has focused on background and environment robustness, positional robustness remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive evaluation protocol to assess the positional robustness of VLAs and apply it to OpenVLA, an open-source, high-performing, and efficient model well suited for real-world deployment. We find that OpenVLA succeeds only when the target object is placed at one of the two positions encountered during training. Even in these cases, the success rate never exceeds 50% because it exhibits a memorized behavior that it randomly executes a grasping action toward one of the two fixed positions without relying on perception to localize the target object. This reveals that OpenVLA's positional robustness is extremely weak.

Is OpenVLA Truly Robust? A Systematic Evaluation of Positional Robustness

Visual reasoning is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to address complex chart queries, yet high-quality rationale data remains scarce. Existing methods leveraged (M)LLMs for data generation, but direct prompting often yields limited precision and diversity. In this paper, we propose \textit{Chain of Functions (CoF)}, a novel programmatic reasoning data generation pipeline that utilizes freely-explored reasoning paths as supervision to ensure data precision and diversity. Specifically, it starts with human-free exploration among the atomic functions (e.g., maximum data and arithmetic operations) to generate diverse function chains, which are then translated into linguistic rationales and questions with only a moderate open-sourced LLM. \textit{CoF} provides multiple benefits: 1) Precision: function-governed generation reduces hallucinations compared to freeform generation; 2) Diversity: enumerating function chains enables varied question taxonomies;  3) Explainability: function chains serve as built-in rationales, allowing fine-grained evaluation beyond overall accuracy; 4) Practicality: it eliminates reliance on extremely large models. Employing \textit{CoF}, we construct the \textit{ChartCoF} dataset, with 1.4k complex reasoning Q\&A for fine-grained analysis and 50k Q\&A for reasoning enhancement.
Experiments show that \textit{ChartCoF} improves performance for MLLMs on widely used benchmarks, and the fine-grained evaluation on \textit{ChartCoF} reveals varying performance across question taxonomies and step numbers for each MLLM. Furthermore, the novel paradigm of function-governed rationale generation in \textit{CoF} could inspire broader applications beyond charts. The code and data have been publicly available at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/Chain-of-Functions}.

Chain of Functions: A Programmatic Pipeline for Fine-Grained Chart Reasoning Data Generation

E-commerce platforms are rich in multimodal data, featuring a variety of images that depict product details. However, this raises an important question: do these images always enhance product understanding, or can they sometimes introduce redundancy or degrade performance? Existing datasets are limited in both scale and design, making it difficult to systematically examine this question. To this end, we introduce EcomMMMU, an e-commerce multimodal multitask understanding dataset with 406,190 samples and 8,989,510 images. EcomMMMU is comprised of multi-image visual-language data designed with 8 essential tasks and a specialized VSS subset to benchmark the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to effectively utilize visual content. Analysis on EcomMMMU reveals that product images do not consistently improve performance and can, in some cases, degrade it. This indicates that MLLMs may struggle to effectively leverage rich visual content for e-commerce tasks. Building on these insights, we propose SUMEI, a data-driven method that strategically utilizes multiple images via predicting visual utilities before using them for downstream tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of SUMEI. The data and code are available through https://github.com/ninglab/EcomMMMU.

EcomMMMU: Strategic Utilization of Visuals for Robust Multimodal E-commerce Models

Text and time series data offer complementary views of financial markets: news articles provide narrative context about company events, while stock prices reflect how markets react to those events. However, despite their complementary nature, effectively integrating these interleaved modalities for improved forecasting remains challenging. In this work, we propose a unified neural architecture that models these interleaved sequences using modality-specific experts, allowing the model to learn unique time series patterns, while still enabling joint reasoning across modalities and preserving pretrained language understanding capabilities. To further improve multimodal understanding, we introduce a cross-modal alignment framework with a salient token weighting mechanism that learns to align representations across modalities with a focus on the most informative tokens. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large-scale financial forecasting task, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide variety of strong unimodal and multimodal baselines. We develop an interpretability method that reveals insights into the value of time series-context and reinforces the design of our cross-modal alignment objective. Finally, we demonstrate that these improvements translate to meaningful economic gains in investment simulations.

Multimodal Language Models for Financial Forecasting from Interleaved Sequences of Text and Time Series

Sign language understanding remains a significant challenge, particularly for low-resource sign languages with limited annotated data. 
Motivated by the success of large-scale pretraining in deep learning, we propose Multi-Stream Masked Autoencoder (MS-MAE) — a simple yet effective framework for learning sign language representations from skeleton-based video data. We pretrained a model with MS-MAE on the YouTube-ASL dataset, and then adapted it to multiple downstream tasks across different sign languages. Experimental results show that MS-MAE achieves competitive or superior performance on a range of isolated sign language recognition benchmarks and gloss-free sign language translation tasks across several sign languages. These findings highlight the potential of leveraging large-scale, high-resource sign language data to boost performance in low-resource sign language scenarios. Additionally, visualization of the model’s attention maps reveals its ability to cluster adjacent pose sequences within a sentence, some of which align with individual signs, offering insights into the mechanisms underlying successful transfer learning.

Improving Sign Language Understanding with a Multi-Stream Masked Autoencoder Trained on ASL Videos

Efficient and privacy-preserving multimodal interaction is essential as AR, VR, and modern smartphones with powerful cameras become primary interfaces for human-computer communication. Existing powerful large vision-language models (VLMs) enabling multimodal interaction often rely on cloud-based processing, raising significant concerns about (1) visual privacy by transmitting sensitive vision data to servers, and (2) their limited real-time, on-device usability. This paper explores **Visual Instruction Rewriting**, a novel approach that transforms multimodal instructions into text-only commands, allowing seamless integration of lightweight on-device instruction rewriter VLMs **(250M parameters)** with existing conversational AI systems, enhancing vision data privacy. To achieve this, we present a dataset of over 39,000 examples across 14 domains and develop a compact VLM, pretrained on image captioning datasets and fine-tuned for instruction rewriting. Experimental results, evaluated through NLG metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE, along with semantic parsing analysis, demonstrate that even a quantized version of the model (<500MB storage footprint) can achieve effective instruction rewriting, thus enabling privacy-focused, multimodal AI applications.

ReVision: A Dataset and Baseline VLM for Privacy-Preserving Task-Oriented Visual Instruction Rewriting

Recent advances in multimodal question answering have primarily focused on combining heterogeneous modalities or fine-tuning multimodal large language models. While these approaches have shown strong performance, they often rely on a single, generalized reasoning strategy, overlooking the unique characteristics of each modality ultimately limiting both accuracy and interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose MAMMQA, a multi-agent QA framework for multimodal inputs spanning text, tables, and images. Our system includes two Visual Language Model (VLM) agents and one text-based Large Language Model (LLM) agent. The first VLM decomposes the user query into sub-questions and sequentially retrieves partial answers from each modality. The second VLM synthesizes and refines these results through cross-modal reasoning. Finally, the LLM integrates the insights into a cohesive answer. This modular design enhances interpretability by making the reasoning process transparent and allows each agent to operate within its domain of expertise. Experiments on diverse multimodal QA benchmarks demonstrate that our cooperative, multi-agent framework consistently outperforms existing baselines in both accuracy and robustness.

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Revisiting Word Embeddings in the LLM Era

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