arXiv:2509. 17192v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-based social simulations can make a generated transcript look like a single behavioral signal, but the model behind that transcript may be doing several different jobs: choosing what an actor says or does, deciding what happens after an action, or both.
The paper introduces ACTOR, a framework that automatically constructs action trajectories for literary role‑playing agents by extracting dialogue and non‑dialogue behaviors from novels and representing them with a Thought‑Action‑Observation structure. It builds a dataset from 143 literary works, generates counterfactual behaviors, and trains models using Regularized Preference Optimization to improve character‑consistent action prediction. Evaluation on 17,560 instances shows that the ACTOR‑trained model significantly outperforms baselines in next‑behavior selection, demonstrating the value of temporally organized supervision for literary role‑playing.
arXiv:2606. 11502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models can state that "the Earth orbits the Sun" and, when role-playing Aristotle, assert the opposite.
PERSONAWEAVER is a new approach to procedural character generation that separates world building from behavioral specification, using manually curated banks of moral positions and conversational reactions to diversify character behavior. By applying this method across ten realistic and fantastical settings and three large language models, the system produces broader moral and interactional response distributions, varied interpersonal language, response length, sentiment, and less archetypal world attribute combinations compared to prior work.
arXiv:2606. 11502v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models can state that "the Earth orbits the Sun" and, when role-playing Aristotle, assert the opposite.
arXiv:2606. 16014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many games rely on storytelling combined with systems that track levelling, NPC behaviour, and consequence simulation; bridging tightly-authored narrative with deeply-simulated worlds -- most acute in sandbox and open-world settings -- has been prohibitively expensive.
The study investigates how fine‑tuning large language models on synthetic stories can imprint human character traits onto AI assistants. Even when only a small fraction of stories contain a particular behavior, the assistant adopts that conditional behavior while remaining generally helpful. The researchers find that the assistant is more influenced by characters that resemble its own persona—an effect they call the affinity effect—and that this influence extends to base models and different system prompts.
arXiv:2607. 18566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persona prompting is widely used to steer LLM agent behavior, yet the narrative framing of a task can matter more than the assigned persona.
The paper examines how multimodal language models, specifically Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct, encode different observer perspectives in their internal representations. By varying persona content and prompt framing across 100 images and 53 conditions, the study finds that early layers encode image identity while later layers develop persona‑specific structures. Prompt framing more strongly alters internal representations than persona identity, yet persona content has a larger effect on behavioural judgments, revealing a dissociation between representational geometry and functional outcomes.
arXiv:2606. 18263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human populations via persona prompting, often under the assumptions that richer persona descriptions improve behavioral fidelity, similarly sized attribute combinations are equally simulatable, and persona definitions generalize across tasks.
Emergi-PersonaOS is a psychology‑grounded operating system designed to manage persona agents throughout their lifecycle. It structures personas into three layers—dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity—allowing the system to infer current persona states from situational cues and generate appropriate actions. The OS records experiences, evaluates revision candidates, and controls belief updates through explicit review and traceable evidence, enabling controllable evolution of persona agents over long interactions.
arXiv:2606. 05553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Role-playing language agents (RPLAs) should play characters whose values and behavior evolve as the story progresses, not maintain a fixed persona.