Aligned but Not Partner-Specific: How Multimodal LLM Agents Succeed in Reference Games Without Forming Conceptual Pacts
Repeated reference games test whether interlocutors replace their initially long descriptions with shorter, partner-specific expressions grounded in shared interaction history; that is, with conceptual pacts. Prior work shows that multimodal LLMs fail to become more efficient across rounds, although they align on the labels they use. However, how can we determine whether this alignment reflects partner-specific grounding rather than a shared task vocabulary? We address this by comparing competent multimodal agent dyads with human dyads from the KTH Tangrams corpus. Our novel methodological contribution is a pragmatically constrained pseudo-dyad baseline: rounds from two different real dya...
| Authors | Po-Ya Angela Wang, Chinmaya Mishra, Aslı Özyürek et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 October 2026 |
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