Reasoning Does Not Necessarily Improve Role-Playing Ability

The application of role-playing large language models (LLMs) is rapidly expanding in both academic and commercial domains, driving an increasing demand for high-precision role-playing models. Simultaneously, the rapid advancement of reasoning techniques has continuously pushed the performance boundaries of LLMs. This intersection of practical role-playing demands and evolving reasoning capabilities raises an important research question: "Can reasoning techniques enhance the role-playing capabilities of LLMs?" To address this, we conduct a comprehensive study using 6 role-playing benchmarks, 24 LLMs, and 3 distinct role-playing strategies, comparing the effectiveness of direct zero-shot role-playing, role-playing with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and role-playing using reasoning-optimized LLMs. Our findings reveal that CoT may reduce role-playing performance, reasoning-optimized LLMs are unsuitable for role-playing, reasoning ability disrupts the role-playing scaling law, large models still lack proficiency in advanced role-playing, and Chinese role-playing performance surpasses English role-playing performance. Furthermore, based on extensive experimental results, we propose two promising future research directions: Role-aware CoT for improving role-playing LLMs and Reinforcement Learning for role-playing LLMs, aiming to enhance the adaptability, consistency, and effectiveness of role-playing LLMs for both research and real-world applications.

Sailor2: Sailing in South-East Asia with Inclusive Multilingual LLMs

Sailor2 is a family of cutting-edge multilingual language models for South-East Asian (SEA) languages, available in 1B, 8B, and 20B sizes to suit diverse applications. Building on Qwen2.5, Sailor2 undergoes continuous pre-training on 500B tokens (400B SEA-specific and 100B replay tokens) to support 13 SEA languages while retaining proficiency in Chinese and English. Sailor2-20B model achieves a 50-50 win rate against GPT-4o across SEA languages. We also deliver a comprehensive cookbook on how to develop the multilingual model in an efficient manner, including five key aspects: data curation, pre-training, post-training, model customization and evaluation. We hope that Sailor2 model (Apache 2.0 license) will drive language development in the SEA region, and Sailor2 cookbook will inspire researchers to build more inclusive LLMs for other under-served languages.

Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of the most influential personality theories reflecting individual differences in thinking, feeling, and behaving. MBTI personality detection has garnered considerable research interest and has evolved significantly over the years. However, this task tends to be overly optimistic, as it currently does not align well with the natural distribution of population personality traits. Specifically, (1) the self-reported labels in existing datasets result in incorrect labeling issues, and (2) the hard labels fail to capture the full range of population personality distributions. In this paper, we optimize the task by constructing MBTIBench, the first manually annotated high-quality MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels, under the guidance of psychologists. As for the first challenge, MBTIBench effectively solves the incorrect labeling issues, which account for 29.58% of the data. As for the second challenge, we estimate soft labels by deriving the polarity tendency of samples. The obtained soft labels confirm that there are more people with non-extreme personality traits. Experimental results not only highlight the polarized predictions and biases in LLMs as key directions for future research, but also confirm that soft labels can provide more benefits to other psychological tasks than hard labels. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Personality-NLP/MbtiBench.

SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types

Scientific question answering (SQA) is an important task aimed at answering questions based on papers. However, current SQA datasets have limited reasoning types and neglect the relevance between tables and text, creating a significant gap with real scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a QA benchmark for scientific tables and text with diverse reasoning types (SciTaT). To cover more reasoning types, we summarize various reasoning types from real-world questions. To involve both tables and text, we require the questions to incorporate tables and text as much as possible. Based on SciTaT, we propose a strong baseline (CaR), which combines various reasoning methods to address different reasoning types and process tables and text at the same time. CaR brings average improvements of 12.9% over other baselines on SciTaT, validating its effectiveness. Error analysis reveals the challenges of SciTaT, such as complex numerical calculations and domain knowledge.

A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Social Agents in Game-Theoretic Scenarios

Game-theoretic scenarios have become pivotal in evaluating the social intelligence of Large Language Model (LLM)-based social agents. While numerous studies have explored these agents in such settings, there is a lack of a comprehensive survey summarizing the current progress. To address this gap, we systematically review existing research on LLM-based social agents within game-theoretic scenarios. Our survey organizes the findings into three core components: Game Framework, Social Agent, and Evaluation Protocol. The game framework encompasses diverse game scenarios, ranging from choice-focusing to communication-focusing games. The social agent part explores agents' preferences, beliefs, and reasoning abilities. The evaluation protocol covers both game-agnostic and game-specific metrics for assessing agent performance. By reflecting on the current research and identifying future research directions, this survey provides insights to advance the development and evaluation of social agents in game-theoretic scenarios.

SailCompass: Towards Reproducible and Robust Evaluation for Southeast Asian Languages

In this paper, we introduce SailCompass, a reproducible and robust evaluation benchmark for assessing Large Language Models (LLMs) on Southeast Asian Languages (SEA). SailCompass encompasses three main SEA languages, eight primary tasks including 14 datasets covering three task types (generation, multiple-choice questions, and classification). To improve the robustness of the evaluation approach, we explore different prompt configurations for multiple-choice questions and leverage calibrations to improve the faithfulness of classification tasks. With SailCompass, we derive the following findings: (1) SEA-specialized LLMs still outperform general LLMs, although the gap has narrowed; (2) A balanced language distribution is important for developing better SEA-specialized LLMs; (3) Advanced prompting techniques (e.g., calibration, perplexity-based ranking) are necessary to better utilize LLMs. All datasets and evaluation scripts are public.

In-Context Transfer Learning: Demonstration Synthesis by Transferring Similar Tasks

In-context learning (ICL) is an effective approach to help large language models (LLMs) adapt to various tasks by providing demonstrations of the target task. Considering the high cost of labeling demonstrations, many methods propose synthesizing demonstrations from scratch using LLMs. However, the quality of the demonstrations synthesized from scratch is limited by the capabilities and knowledge of LLMs. To address this, inspired by transfer learning, we propose In-Context Transfer Learning (ICTL), which synthesizes target task demonstrations by transferring labeled demonstrations from similar source tasks. ICTL consists of two steps: source sampling and target transfer. First, we define an optimization objective, which minimizes transfer error to sample source demonstrations similar to the target task. Then, we employ LLMs to transfer the sampled source demonstrations to the target task, matching the definition and format of the target task. Experiments on Super-NI show that ICTL outperforms synthesis from scratch by 2.0% on average, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

FLEXTAF: Enhancing Table Reasoning with Flexible Tabular Formats

The table reasoning task aims to answer the question according to the given table. Currently, using Large Language Models (LLMs) is the predominant method for table reasoning. Most existing methods employ a fixed tabular format to represent the table, which could limit the performance. Given that each instance requires different capabilities and models possess varying abilities, we assert that different instances and models suit different tabular formats. We prove the aforementioned claim through quantitative analysis of experimental results, where different instances and models achieve different performances using various tabular formats. Building on this discussion, we propose FLEXTAF-Single and FLEXTAF-Vote to enhance table reasoning performance by employing flexible tabular formats. Specifically, (i) FLEXTAF-Single trains a classifier to predict the most suitable tabular format based on the instance and the LLM. (ii) FLEXTAF-Vote integrates the results across different formats. Our experiments on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact reveal significant improvements, with average gains of 2.3% and 4.8% compared to the best performance achieved using a fixed tabular format with greedy decoding and self-consistency decoding, thereby validating the effectiveness of our methods.

DAC: Decomposed Automation Correction for Text-to-SQL

Text-to-SQL is an important task that helps people obtain information from databases by automatically generating SQL queries. Considering the brilliant performance, approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) become the mainstream for text-to-SQL. Among these approaches, automated correction is an effective approach that further enhances performance by correcting the mistakes in the generated results. The existing correction methods require LLMs to directly correct with generated SQL, while previous research shows that LLMs do not know how to detect mistakes, leading to poor performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to employ the decomposed correction to enhance text-to-SQL performance. We first demonstrate that decomposed correction outperforms direct correction since detecting and fixing mistakes with the results of the decomposed sub-tasks is easier than with SQL. Based on this analysis, we introduce Decomposed Automation Correction (DAC), which corrects SQL by decomposing text-to-SQL into entity linking and skeleton parsing. DAC first generates the entity and skeleton corresponding to the question and then compares the differences between the initial SQL and the generated entities and skeleton as feedback for correction. Experimental results show that our method improves performance by $3.7\%$ on average of Spider, Bird, and KaggleDBQA compared with the baseline method, demonstrating the effectiveness of DAC.

Scaling Laws with Vocabulary: Larger Models Deserve Larger Vocabularies

Research on scaling large language models (LLMs) has primarily focused on model parameters and training data size, overlooking the role of vocabulary size. % Intuitively, larger vocabularies enable more efficient tokenization by representing sentences with fewer tokens, but they also increase the risk of under-fitting representations for rare tokens. We investigate how vocabulary size impacts LLM scaling laws by training models ranging from 33M to 3B parameters on up to 500B characters with various vocabulary configurations. We propose three complementary approaches for predicting the compute-optimal vocabulary size: IsoFLOPs analysis, derivative estimation, and parametric fit of the loss function. Our approaches converge on the same result that the optimal vocabulary size depends on the available compute budget and that larger models deserve larger vocabularies. However, most LLMs use too small vocabulary sizes. For example, we predict that the optimal vocabulary size of Llama2-70B should have been at least 216K, 7 times larger than its vocabulary of 32K. We validate our predictions empirically by training models with 3B parameters across different FLOPs budgets. Adopting our predicted optimal vocabulary size consistently improves downstream performance over commonly used vocabulary sizes. By increasing the vocabulary size from the conventional 32K to 43K, we improve performance on ARC-Challenge from 29.1 to 32.0 with the same 2.3e21 FLOPs. Our work emphasizes the necessity of jointly considering model parameters and vocabulary size for efficient scaling.