arXiv Computation and Language

Generating Diverse Personas for User Simulators to Test Interview Dialogue Systems

arXiv:2608. 19549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the issue of the significant labor required to test interview dialogue systems.

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 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
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.

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 AI
Jul 10

SimRPD: Optimizing Recruitment Proactive Dialogue Agents through Simulator-Based Data Evaluation and Selection

arXiv:2601. 02871v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task-oriented proactive dialogue agents play a pivotal role in recruitment, particularly for steering conversations towards specific business outcomes, such as acquiring social-media contacts for private-channel conversion.

By Zhiyong Cao, Dunqiang Liu, Qi Dai, Haojun Xu, Huai Yuen Khor, Hao Wang, Huan He, Yafei Liu, Ke Ma, Ruqian Shi, Sicheng Zhou, Sijia Yao
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
Oct 12

MADS: Multi-Agent Dialog Simulation for Robust Conversational Agents

MADS (Multi-Agent Dialog Simulation) is a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates structured, diverse dialogue trajectories, including adversarial conversations that reflect realistic failure scenarios. The resulting MADS-Bench benchmark covers six domains, 55 personas, and 1095 conversations, with about 66% featuring failure-prone situations. Models trained with MADS are evaluated using a two-stage approach combining supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to assess robustness.

By Arkajyoti Chakraborty, Adam Zernik, Ishika Kulkarni, Mudit Arora, Hugo Lin, Justin Chiu, Alessandro Di Bari, Neha Gupta, Andreas Stolcke