Razan Baltaji

I am a PhD student at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, advised by Lav Varshney. Prior to that I completed my MSc and BSc in Physics at the American University of Beirut. My research explores multi-agent LLM systems and the emergent behavior of AI collectives, with the goal of building adaptive systems that extend human creativity and collective intelligence.

Alongside academic work, I co-founded Fatima Fellowship, an international program dedicated to supporting aspiring researchers in AI from developing countries. Previously, I conducted research at Technology for Development Division at United Nations Economic & Social Commission for Western Asia and the Sustainability and Inclusive Development Cluster at Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, working on technology-driven approaches to development and public policy.

Selected publications

Many LLMs Are More Utilitarian Than One

Razan Baltaji^*, Anita Keshmirian^*, Babak Hemmatian, and 2 more authors

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025

Link Bib Code Poster

@inproceedings{keshmirian2025many,
  title = {Many {LLM}s Are More Utilitarian Than One},
  author = {Baltaji, Razan and Keshmirian, Anita and Hemmatian, Babak and Asghari, Hadi and Varshney, Lav R.},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=wn3VBRz5GK},
}

Conformity, Confabulation, and Impersonation: Persona Inconstancy in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration

Razan Baltaji, Babak Hemmatian, and Lav Varshney

In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP, 2024

Link Bib Code Poster

@inproceedings{baltaji-etal-2024-conformity,
  title = {Conformity, Confabulation, and Impersonation: Persona Inconstancy in Multi-Agent {LLM} Collaboration},
  author = {Baltaji, Razan and Hemmatian, Babak and Varshney, Lav},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP},
  year = {2024},
  address = {Bangkok, Thailand},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.c3nlp-1.2/},
  pages = {17--31},
}