arXiv AI

Personas Differ from Native-Language Generation: Language Pathways Shape LLM Interpersonal Advice

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

When Persona Attributes Improve Population Alignment in Large Language Models

The paper investigates how persona prompting—using short textual descriptions of individuals—to align large language models (LLMs) with human survey responses. It examines the impact of selecting different persona attributes and finds that not all attribute combinations improve performance, suggesting that the variation in human responses to survey questions may explain mixed results. The study evaluates multiple attribute selection methods across four social surveys, two countries, six LLMs, and twenty prediction tasks, offering guidance on when persona prompting is beneficial and which attribute choices are most effective.

By Leon Fr\"ohling, Jens Rupprecht, Markus Strohmaier, Claudia Wagner
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Controlling and Assessing Appropriate Persona Use in LLM-based Dialogue Generation

The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) tend to overuse persona attributes in persona-based dialogue generation, producing unnatural responses. It identifies a systematic bias in LLMs to incorporate all provided persona details and shows that current metrics cannot assess contextual appropriateness. To address this, the authors introduce Self-CONtrastive Persona Overuse Suppression (SCONPOS), which intervenes in the prompt encoding stage to reduce overuse, and propose the Persona Appropriateness Score (PAS), a new metric that penalizes both overuse and underuse of persona attributes.

By Jongkyung Shin, Inkyu Lee, Chiehyeon Lim
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Do Personality-Tuned LLMs Make Better Social Agents?

The paper examines whether fine‑tuning large language models (LLMs) with personality‑labelled data improves their ability to act as socially interactive agents. Two small open‑weight LLMs were fine‑tuned on a corpus of personality‑labelled social media posts and dialogues, and the resulting models were evaluated in various social interaction scenarios by independent LLM judges. The findings show that the fine‑tuned models do not outperform their baseline counterparts in role‑playing personalities, though they offer comparable text quality and increased linguistic diversity for the Qwen models; low inter‑rater agreement limits confidence in the results, suggesting future work should focus on training data quality and domain alignment.

By Tim Krabbe, Xiaodan Shi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

PERSONAWEAVER: Controllable Diversity Beyond Conventional Archetypes in Procedural Character Generation

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.

By Maan Qraitem, Kate Saenko, Bryan A. Plummer
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding

The paper introduces CAPRI, a dataset of conversations designed to test whether large language models (LLMs) can adapt their responses to users’ cultural backgrounds. Experiments show that while LLMs can infer a user’s cultural context and recall relevant conventions, they frequently fail to apply this knowledge when generating answers unless explicitly prompted to do so. The study also finds that LLMs’ cultural adaptations improve as more cues are provided, yet their default priors are not culture‑neutral and sometimes reflect the model’s country of origin.

By Yisong Miao, Jian Zhu, Vered Shwartz
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Ask don't tell: Reducing sycophancy in large language models

arXiv:2602. 23971v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts.

By Magda Dubois, Cozmin Ududec, Christopher Summerfield, Lennart Luettgau
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Evaluating Communicative Success in Machine-Translated Conversation

The paper introduces a three‑layer checklist-and-judge framework to evaluate interpreter agents that mediate live conversation across languages. It assesses semantic, pragmatic, and cultural‑social dimensions—naturalness, intent, and social appropriateness—rather than just fidelity, in both single‑turn and multi‑turn settings. Extensive validation shows that conventional MT metrics miss failures in stronger interpreters, and that context, structured instructions, and cultural cues influence communicative success.

By Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Alice Oh