arXiv AI

LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals

arXiv:2411. 10109v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning can predict human behavior well when substantial structured data are available for well-defined outcomes.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

A Three-Tier Persona Vector for Controllable User Simulation in Agentic Evaluation

The paper introduces a three-tier persona vector for user simulation in evaluating LLM agents, comprising 23 dimensions across demographics, behavioral traits, and emotional states, plus a query-complexity overlay. It demonstrates that these nuanced personas generate diverse, scenario-reactive conversations, leading to significant variations in agent goal achievement and compliance across different contexts. The model’s design allows for reproducible, auditable user behavior patterns without relying on learned covariance matrices.

By Rahul Khedar, Eshita, Sneha Teja Sree Reddy Thondapu, Mayank Malhotra, Arup Kumar Das, Jitesh Chandra Mishra, Arun Menon, Avinash Karn, Mouli V
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Do Synthetic Personas Predict Real Audience Response? A Sim-to-Real Study Where a No-Persona Baseline Beats Persona-Based Copy Simulation

The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) used as synthetic personas can predict real audience responses to marketing copy. Using thousands of headline A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, the authors compare a ten-persona panel grounded in real audience demographics to a no-persona zero‑shot baseline that asks the model for a typical reader’s click likelihood. Results show that the no‑persona baseline outperforms the persona‑based approach, with higher predictive validity and top‑1 accuracy, indicating that forcing the model to role‑play specific personas introduces bias and noise.

By Alexandre Cristov\~ao Maiorano
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Beyond BFI: The CSI for Enhanced Reliability and Validity in Evaluating LLM Personality Traits

The paper introduces the Core Sentiment Inventory (CSI), a new personality trait evaluation tool for large language models (LLMs) that addresses reliability and validity issues found in existing methods like the Big Five Inventory (BFI). CSI is designed specifically for LLMs, supports both English and Chinese, and provides detailed psychological portraits of model behavior. Experiments show that CSI captures nuanced behavioral patterns, improves reliability, and correlates strongly (above 0.85) with real-world LLM outputs.

By Huanhuan Ma, Haisong Gong, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie, Philip S. Yu, Dongkuan Xu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

A Three-Tier Persona Vector for Controllable User Simulation in Agentic Evaluation

The paper introduces a three-tier persona vector to generate diverse, realistic user inputs for evaluating tool-augmented LLM agents. The vector includes 23 dimensions: categorical demographics, continuous behavioral traits, and continuous emotional states, plus a query-complexity overlay. Experiments on 64,698 conversations show that these persona dimensions produce measurable differences in agent performance and realistic scenario-reactive behavior.