arXiv Computation and Language

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 18

How Well Do Large Language Models Capture Human Personality?

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.

By Aanisha Bhattacharyya, Yaman Kumar Singla, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Changyou Chen, Jitendra Ajmera
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Culturally Grounded Personas in Large Language Models: Characterization and Alignment with Socio-Psychological Value Frameworks

arXiv:2601. 22396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the growing utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human behavior, the extent to which these synthetic personas accurately reflect world and moral value systems across different cultural conditionings remains uncertain.

By Candida M. Greco, Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli
arXiv AI
Sep 10

The Failure Happens Before the Drift: The Social Dynamics of Values in LLM Agent Societies

The study introduces a World Values Survey–grounded simulation framework to test whether large language model agents can faithfully represent diverse human value systems. In about 4,000 conversations with 1,200 personas across three models, more than half of the agents failed to express their assigned value profiles from the start, and only 2–7% drifted over time. The results show systematic deviations from the intended value distributions and reveal that simulated dialogues differ from human discussions in their balance of stylistic consistency and semantic diversity.

By Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
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 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 Computation and Language
1d ago

LLM Persona Unlearning

arXiv:2609.39882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-training equips large language models (LLMs) with a broad repertoire of behavioral patterns associated with roles, styles, values, and goals. Post-...

By Kemou Li, Zhuan Shi, Qizhou Wang, Fengpeng Li, Negar Rostamzadeh, Golnoosh Farnadi, Jiantao Zhou