Proceedings

Leveraging Large Language Models for Active Merchant Non-player Characters

Byungjun Kim, Minju Kim, Dayeon Seo, Bugeun Kim

Download BibTeX Cite

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AI, Arts & Creativity. Pages 10108-10116.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1123

Keywords

  • Application domains: Games
  • Methods and resources: Applications and software frameworks

Abstract

We highlight two significant issues leading to the passivity of current merchant non-player characters (NPCs): pricing and communication. While immersive interactions with active NPCs have been a focus, price negotiations between merchant NPCs and players remain underexplored. First, passive pricing refers to the limited ability of merchants to modify predefined item prices. Second, passive communication means that merchants can only interact with players in a scripted manner. To tackle these issues and create an active merchant NPC, we propose a merchant framework based on large language models (LLMs), called MART, which consists of an appraiser module and a negotiator module. We conducted two experiments to explore various implementation options under different training methods and LLM sizes, considering a range of possible game environments. Our findings indicate that finetuning methods, such as supervised finetuning (SFT) and knowledge distillation (KD), are effective in using smaller LLMs to implement active merchant NPCs. Additionally, we found three irregular cases arising from the responses of LLMs.

Byungjun Kim, Minju Kim, Dayeon Seo, and Bugeun Kim. 2025. Leveraging Large Language Models for Active Merchant Non-player Characters. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 10108–10116. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1123
Welcome Future Conferences AI Journal Division IJCAI Proceedings About IJCAI IJCAI Awards