arXiv:2605.29791v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) can convincingly simulate personas in explicit self-reports, they often deviate in implicit behavioral decisions...
By Yutong Yang, Chenxi Miao, Weikang Li, Yunfang Wu
arXiv:2606. 24162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics.
By Jin Huang, Yutong Xie, Wanli Song, Xingjian Zhang, Walter Yuan, Matthew O. Jackson, Qiaozhu Mei
arXiv:2607. 26348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic users, stand-ins for human respondents whose simulated answers feed product, policy, and market decisions.
By Zihan Chen, Di Zhu, Lei Nico Zheng
arXiv:2609.38392v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Personas used to seed LLM social simulations face a cold-start problem: existing methods lack a principled basis for deciding which attributes to inclu...
By Jinyi Ye, Yuangang Li, Chenxiao Yu, Preyashi Poddar, Priyanka Dey, Longtian Ye, Zihan Wang, Xiyang Hu, Emilio Ferrara, Yue Zhao
arXiv:2606. 12730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anticipating LLM behavioral tendencies from low-cost psychometric probes is critical for safe deployment, but only if self-reports (SR) reliably predict behavior.
By Rafal Kocielnik, Pengrui Han, Peiyang Song, Myrl G. Marmarelis, Ramit Debnath, Dean Mobbs, Anima Anandkumar, R. Michael Alvarez
arXiv:2507.19364v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into social simulation has generated considerable enthusiasm, but also raises substantial methodolo...
By Patrick Taillandier, Jean Daniel Zucker, Arnaud Grignard, Benoit Gaudou, Nghi Quang Huynh, Haojia Kong, Alexis Drogoul
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
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:2606. 14199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation.
By Xuhui Zhou, Weiwei Sun, Weihua Du, Jiarui Liu, Haojia Sun, Qianou Ma, Tongshuang Wu, Yiming Yang, Maarten Sap
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
arXiv:2609.22090v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An LLM producing the response pattern associated with a human psychological effect is not the same claim as the LLM possessing that bias. We present Ps...
By Joy Bose
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.