mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Character is Destiny: Can Role-Playing Language Agents Make Persona-Driven Decisions?

arXiv 2404.12138 ↗First posted 18 Apr 2024cs.AIcited by 34

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate

Abstract (arXiv)

Can Large Language Models (LLMs) simulate humans in making important decisions? Recent research has unveiled the potential of using LLMs to develop role-playing language agents (RPLAs), mimicking mainly the knowledge and tones of various characters. However, imitative decision-making necessitates a more nuanced understanding of personas. In this paper, we benchmark the ability of LLMs in persona-driven decision-making. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can predict characters' decisions provided by the preceding stories in high-quality novels. Leveraging character analyses written by literary experts, we construct a dataset LIFECHOICE comprising 1,462 characters' decision points from 388 books. Then, we conduct comprehensive experiments on LIFECHOICE, with various LLMs and RPLA methodologies. The results demonstrate that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit promising capabilities in this task, yet substantial room for improvement remains. Hence, we further propose the CHARMAP method, which adopts persona-based memory retrieval and significantly advances RPLAs on this task, achieving 5.03% increase in accuracy.

Key facts. Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 13 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2024.

Builds on

13 of 42 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Can Large Language Model Agents Simulate Human Trust Behavior?7 Feb
  2. 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing16 Oct

Other references · 11

  1. 2020DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attentioncited by 2,157
  2. 2023LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalizationcited by 425
  3. 2022Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Trainingcited by 358
  4. 2021Recursively Summarizing Books with Human Feedbackcited by 287
  5. 2023InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviewscited by 177
  6. 2023BooookScore: A systematic exploration of book-length summarization in the era of LLMscited by 137
  7. 2021"Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understandingcited by 48
  8. 2023LiveChat: A Large-Scale Personalized Dialogue Dataset Automatically Constructed from Live Streamingcited by 27
  9. 2022COSPLAY: Concept Set Guided Personalized Dialogue Generation Across Both Party Personascited by 20
  10. 2022Few-Shot Character Understanding in Movies as an Assessment to Meta-Learning of Theory-of-Mindcited by 19
  11. 2018Automated Extraction of Personal Knowledge from Smartphone Push Notificationscited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 4; 2025: 14; 2026: 16.

34 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2025Learning to Reason for Long-Form Story Generationcited by 34
  2. 2025How Far are LLMs from Being Our Digital Twins? A Benchmark for Persona-Based Behavior Chain Simulationcited by 21
  3. 2025TwinVoice: A Multi-dimensional Benchmark Towards Digital Twins via LLM Persona Simulationcited by 13
  4. 2025IMPersona: Evaluating Individual Level LM Impersonationcited by 11
  5. 2025CPO: Addressing Reward Ambiguity in Role-playing Dialogue via Comparative Policy Optimizationcited by 10
  6. 2026HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playingcited by 10
  7. 2026OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulationcited by 8
  8. 2024PersLLM: A Personified Training Approach for Large Language Modelscited by 6
  9. 2025CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewardscited by 6
  10. 2025textttBluePrint: A Social Media User Dataset for LLM Persona Evaluation and Trainingcited by 6
  11. 2024Thinking Before Speaking: A Role-playing Model with Mindsetcited by 5
  12. 2025Guess What I am Thinking: A Benchmark for Inner Thought Reasoning of Role-Playing Language Agentscited by 5
22 more
  1. 2025Moral Susceptibility and Robustness under Persona Role-Play in Large Language Modelscited by 4
  2. 2026Reinforcing Human Behavior Simulation via Verbal Feedbackcited by 4
  3. 2025FURINA: A Fully Customizable Role-Playing Benchmark via Scalable Multi-Agent Collaboration Pipelinecited by 3
  4. 2026Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Societycited by 3
  5. 2024Inertia in Moral and Value Judgments of Large Language Modelscited by 2
  6. 2025PersonaAgent with GraphRAG: Community-Aware Knowledge Graphs for Personalized LLMcited by 2
  7. 2026Enhancing Persona Following at Decoding Time via Dynamic Importance Estimation for Role-Playing Agentscited by 2
  8. 2024CharacterBench: Benchmarking Character Customization of Large Language Modelscited by 1
  9. 2025Can Large Language Models Capture Human Risk Preferences? A Cross-Cultural Studycited by 1
  10. 2025Synthia: Scalable Grounded Persona Generation from Social Media Datacited by 1
  11. 2025Understanding Generalization in Role-Playing Models via Information Theorycited by 1
  12. 2026HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patternscited by 1
  13. 2026Agentopia: Long-Term Life Simulation and Learning in Agent Societiescited by 1
  14. 2026Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agentscited by 1
  15. 2026TRACE Bench: Task-driven Roleplay Agentic Checklist Evaluationcited by 1
  16. 2026PsyAgent: Constructing Human-like Agents Based on Psychological Modeling and Contextual Interactioncited by 0
  17. 2026Through the Lens of Character: Resolving Modality-Role Interference in Multimodal Role-Playing Agentcited by 0
  18. 2026Soul Computing: A Theoretical Framework and Technical Architecture for Intelligent Agents with Independent Consciousnesscited by 0
  19. 2026An Agentic Approach for Active Data Collection, Travel Behavior Modeling, and Weather-Sensitive Demand Predictioncited by 0
  20. 2026PersMem: Internalizing Personality into Dual-Pathway Memory for LLM Agentscited by 0
  21. 2026OSPD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Persona-Consistent Dialoguecited by 0
  22. 2026PersonaManifold: Revealing and Exploiting Curved Geometry in LLM Persona Representationscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Role-Playing Agents Driven by Large Language Models: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Trends
  2. 2024From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents
  3. 2025Test-Time-Matching: Decouple Personality, Memory, and Linguistic Style in LLM-based Role-Playing Language Agent
  4. 2024On the Decision-Making Abilities in Role-Playing using Large Language Models
  5. 2025PersonaEval: Are LLM Evaluators Human Enough to Judge Role-Play?
  6. 2026Deep Persona: A Psychologically Grounded Architecture and Evaluation Framework for Role-Playing Agents and Simulations
  7. 2024Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Mitigating the Negative Impact of Role-playing Prompts in Zero-shot Reasoning Tasks
  8. 2024CharacterGPT: A Persona Reconstruction Framework for Role-Playing Agents