Morocco

Eliciting cooperation in multi-agent LLM systems is critical for AI alignment. We investigate two approaches: direct communication and curriculum learning. In a 4-player Stag Hunt, a one-word &quot;cheap talk&quot; channel increases cooperation from 0% to 48.3%, demonstrating communication as a robust coordination mechanism. In contrast, we find that curriculum learning is highly sensitive to design choices: our pedagogical curriculum through progressively complex games reduced agent payoffs by 27.4% in an Iterated Public Goods Game with Punishment. Qualitative analysis reveals that curricula emphasizing defection-equilibrium games can induce &quot;learned pessimism&quot; in agents. These findings suggest that for coordination problems, simple communication protocols may be more reliable than experience-based training, and that curriculum design for social dilemmas requires careful attention to the strategic lessons embedded in game sequences.

EACL 2026

Communication Enables Cooperation in LLM Agents: A Comparison with Curriculum-Based Approaches

multi-agent llm cooperation

cheap talk

curriculum learning

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 in Bologna, Italy as a joint event comprising the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA), the 5th International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), and the 9th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL).

Subsequent AAMAS conferences have been held in Melbourne, Australia (July 2003), New York City, NY, USA (July 2004), Utrecht, The Netherlands (July 2005), Hakodate, Japan (May 2006), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 2007), Estoril, Portugal (May 2008), Budapest, Hungary (May 2009), Toronto, Canada (May 2010), Taipei, Taiwan (May 2011), Valencia, Spain (June 2012), Minnesota, USA (May 2013), Paris, France (May 2014), Istanbul, Turkey (May 2015), Singapore (May 2016), São Paulo (2017) and Stockholm, Sweden (2018), Montreal (May 2019), Auckland (May 2020, Virtual), London (May 2021, Virtual).
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AAMAS 2022

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

Eliciting cooperation in multi-agent LLM systems is critical for AI alignment. We investigate two approaches: direct communication and curriculum learning. In a 4-player Stag Hunt, a one-word "cheap talk" channel increases cooperation from 0% to 48.3%, demonstrating communication as a robust coordination mechanism. In contrast, we find that curriculum learning is highly sensitive to design choices: our pedagogical curriculum through progressively complex games reduced agent payoffs by 27.4% in an Iterated Public Goods Game with Punishment. Qualitative analysis reveals that curricula emphasizing defection-equilibrium games can induce "learned pessimism" in agents. These findings suggest that for coordination problems, simple communication protocols may be more reliable than experience-based training, and that curriculum design for social dilemmas requires careful attention to the strategic lessons embedded in game sequences.

technical paper

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Ensuring the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical alignment challenge. Existing approaches often rely on invasive fine- tuning or external generation-based checks, which can be opaque and resource-inefficient. In this work, we investigate the geometry of safety concepts within pretrained representations, proposing a mechanistic methodology that identifies the layer where safe and unsafe concepts are maximally separable within a pretrained model’s representation space. By leveraging the intrinsic activation space of the optimal layer, we show that safety enforcement can be achieved via a simple linear classifier, avoiding the need for weight modification. We validate our framework across multiple domains (regulation, law, finance, cybersecurity, education, code, human resources, and social media), diverse tasks (safety classification, prompt injection, and toxicity detection), and 16 non-English languages on both encoder and decoder architectures. Our results show that: (i) the separation between safe and unsafe concepts emerges from a single layer direction in the activation space, (ii) monitoring internal representations provides a significantly more robust safeguarding mechanism compared to traditional evaluative or generative guardrail paradigms.

Safe-Unsafe Concept Separation Emerges from a Single Direction in Language Models Activation Space

Social media platforms face escalating challenges in detecting harmful content that promotes muscle dysmorphic behaviors and cognitions (bigorexia). This content can evade moderation by camouflaging as legitimate fitness advice and disproportionately affects adolescent males. We address this challenge with BigTokDetect, a clinically informed framework for identifying pro-bigorexia content on TikTok. We introduce BigTok, the first expert-annotated multimodal benchmark dataset of over 2,200 TikTok videos labeled by clinical psychiatrists across five categories and eighteen fine-grained subcategories. Comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art vision-language models reveals that while commercial zero-shot models achieve the highest accuracy on broad primary categories, supervised fine-tuning enables smaller open-source models to perform better on fine-grained subcategory detection. Ablation studies show that multimodal fusion improves performance by 5 to 15 percent, with video features providing the most discriminative signals. These findings support a grounded moderation approach that automates detection of explicit harms while flagging ambiguous content for human review, and they establish a scalable framework for harm mitigation in emerging mental health domains.

BigTokDetect: A Clinically-Informed Vision-Language Modeling Framework for Detecting Pro-Bigorexia Videos on TikTok

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of instruction-following tasks, yet their grasp of nuanced social science concepts remains underexplored. This paper examines whether LLMs can identify and classify fine-grained forms of populism, a complex and contested concept in both academic and media debates. To this end, we curate and release novel datasets specifically designed to capture populist discourse. We evaluate a range of pre-trained (large) language models, both open-weight and proprietary, across multiple prompting paradigms. Our analysis reveals notable variation in performance, highlighting the limitations of LLMs in detecting populist discourse. We find that a fine-tuned RoBERTa classifier vastly outperforms all new-era instruction-tuned LLMs, unless fine-tuned. Additionally, we apply our best-performing model to analyze campaign speeches by Donald Trump, extracting valuable insights into his strategic use of populist rhetoric. Finally, we assess the generalizability of these models by benchmarking them on campaign speeches by European politicians, offering a lens into cross-context transferability in political discourse analysis. In this setting, we find that instruction-tuned LLMs exhibit greater robustness on out-of-domain data.

Identifying Fine-grained Forms of Populism in Political Discourse: A Case Study on Donald Trump's Presidential Campaigns

Game-theoretic interactions between agents with large language models (LLMs) have revealed many emergent capabilities, yet the linguistic diversity of these interactions has not been sufficiently quantified. In this paper, we present the Conversational Robustness Evaluation Score: CORE, a metric to quantify the effectiveness of language use within multi-agent systems across different game-theoretic interactions. CORE integrates measures of cluster entropy, lexical repetition, and semantic similarity, providing a direct lens of dialog quality. We apply CORE to pairwise LLM dialogs across competitive, cooperative, and neutral settings, further grounding our analysis in Zipf's and Heaps' Laws to characterize word frequency distributions and vocabulary growth. Our findings show that cooperative settings exhibit both steeper Zipf distributions and higher Heap exponents, indicating more repetition alongside greater vocabulary expansion. In contrast, competitive interactions display lower Zipf and Heaps exponents, reflecting less repetition and more constrained vocabularies. These results provide new insights into how social incentives influence language adaptation, and highlight CORE as a robust diagnostic for measuring linguistic robustness in multi-agent LLM systems.

CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressures

Workflows are a fundamental component of automation in enterprise platforms, enabling the orchestration of tasks, data processing, and system integrations. Despite being widely used, building workflows can be complex, often requiring manual configuration through low-code platforms or visual programming tools. To simplify this process, we explore the use of generative foundation models, particularly vision-language models (VLMs), to automatically generate structured workflows from visual inputs. Translating hand-drawn sketches or computer-generated diagrams into executable workflows is challenging due to the ambiguity of free-form drawings, variations in diagram styles, and the difficulty of inferring execution logic from visual elements. To address this, we introduce StarFlow, a framework for generating structured workflow outputs from sketches using vision-language models. We curate a diverse dataset of workflow diagrams -- including synthetic, manually annotated, and real-world samples -- to enable robust training and evaluation. We finetune and benchmark multiple vision-language models, conducting a series of ablation studies to analyze the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our results show that finetuning significantly enhances structured workflow generation, outperforming large vision-language models on this task.

StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images

The way our eyes move while reading can tell us about the cognitive effort required to process the text. In the present study, we use this fact to generate texts with controllable reading ease. Our method employs a model that predicts human gaze patterns to steer language model outputs towards eliciting certain reading behaviors. We evaluate the approach in an eye-tracking experiment with native and non-native speakers of English. The results demonstrate that the method is effective at making the generated texts easier or harder to read, measured both in terms of reading times and perceived difficulty of the texts. A statistical analysis reveals that the changes in reading behavior are mostly due to features that affect lexical processing. Possible applications of our approach include generation of personalized educational material for language learning and text simplification for information accessibility.

Controlling Reading Ease with Gaze-Guided Text Generation

Recent studies suggest that transformer-based vision-language models (VLMs) capture the multimodality of concept processing in the human brain. However, a systematic evaluation exploring different types of VLM architectures and the role played by visual and textual context is still lacking. Here, we analyse multiple VLMs employing different strategies to integrate visual and textual modalities, along with language-only counterparts. We measure the alignment between concept representations by models and existing (fMRI) brain responses to concept words presented in two experimental conditions, where either visual (pictures) or textual (sentences) context is provided. Our results reveal that VLMs outperform the language-only counterparts in both experimental conditions. However, controlled ablation studies show that only for some VLMs, such as LXMERT and IDEFICS2, brain alignment stems from genuinely learning more human-like concepts during _pretraining_, while others are highly sensitive to the context provided at _inference_. Additionally, we find that vision-language encoders are more brain-aligned than more recent, generative VLMs. Altogether, our study shows that VLMs align with human neural representations in concept processing, while highlighting differences among architectures.

Vision-Language Models Align with Human Neural Representations in Concept Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) are integral to applications such as conversational agents and content creation, where precise control over a model's personality is essential for maintaining tone, consistency, and user engagement. However, prevailing prompt-based or fine-tuning approaches either lack robustness or demand large-scale training data, making them costly and impractical. In this paper, we present PALETTE (Personality Adjustment by LLM SElf-TargeTed quEries), a novel method for personality editing in LLMs. Our approach introduces adjustment queries, where self-referential statements grounded in psychological constructs are treated analogously to factual knowledge, enabling direct editing of personality-related responses. Unlike fine-tuning, PALETTE requires only 12 editing samples to achieve substantial improvements in personality alignment across personality dimensions. Experimental results from both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our method enables more stable and well-balanced personality control in LLMs.

Personality Editing for Language Models through Adjusting Self-Referential Queries

Long-form videos that span across wide temporal intervals are highly information redundant and contain multiple distinct events or entities that are often loosely related. Therefore, when performing long-form video question answering (LVQA), all information necessary to generate a correct response can often be contained within a small subset of frames. Recent literature leverage large language models (LLMs) in LVQA benchmarks, achieving exceptional performance, while relying on vision language models (VLMs) to convert all visual content within videos into natural language. Such VLMs often independently caption a large number of frames uniformly sampled from long videos, which is not efficient and can mostly be redundant. Motivated by this inefficiency, we propose LVNet, a modular and training-free framework featuring a novel Hierarchical Keyframe Selector (HKS) that efficiently selects a minimal set of informative frames tailored to each question. LVNet's modularity allows easy integration with existing approaches for more efficient LVQA. We achieve state-of-the-art performance among similarly configured models across four benchmark LVQA datasets: EgoSchema, NExT-QA, IntentQA, VideoMME. Our code will be released publicly.

Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA

We introduce Simplified Topic Retrieval Exploration and Analysis Module for Chinese language (STREAM-ZH), the first topic modeling package to fully support the Chinese language across a broad range of topic models, evaluation metrics, and preprocessing workflows. Tailored to both simplified and traditional Chinese language, our package extends the STREAM topic modeling framework with a curated collection of preprocessed textual datasets in Chinese from which we assess the performance of classical, neural, and clustering topic models using commonly-used intruder, diversity, and coherence metrics. The results of a benchmark analysis bring evidence that within our framework, topic models may generate coherent and diverse topics from datasets in Chinese language, outperforming those generated by topic models using English-translated textual input. Our framework facilitates multilingual accessibility and research in topic modeling applied to Chinese textual data. The code is available at the following link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STREAM-ZH-DC5B

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