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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12138 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12138/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10005/) (2022)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Recursively Summarizing Books with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10862/) (2021)
- [InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17976/) (2023)
- [BooookScore: A systematic exploration of book-length summarization in the era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00785/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Model Agents Simulate Human Trust Behavior?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04559/) (2024)
- ["Let Your Characters Tell Their Story": A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05438/) (2021)
- [LiveChat: A Large-Scale Personalized Dialogue Dataset Automatically Constructed from Live Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08401/) (2023)
- [COSPLAY: Concept Set Guided Personalized Dialogue Generation Across Both Party Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00872/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Character Understanding in Movies as an Assessment to Meta-Learning of Theory-of-Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04684/) (2022)
- [Automated Extraction of Personal Knowledge from Smartphone Push Notifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02013/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning to Reason for Long-Form Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22828/) (2025)
- [How Far are LLMs from Being Our Digital Twins? A Benchmark for Persona-Based Behavior Chain Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14642/) (2025)
- [TwinVoice: A Multi-dimensional Benchmark Towards Digital Twins via LLM Persona Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25536/) (2025)
- [OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14199/) (2026)
- [IMPersona: Evaluating Individual Level LM Impersonation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04332/) (2025)
- [CPO: Addressing Reward Ambiguity in Role-playing Dialogue via Comparative Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09074/) (2025)
- [HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21459/) (2026)
- [PersLLM: A Personified Training Approach for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12393/) (2024)
- [CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17147/) (2025)
- [textttBluePrint: A Social Media User Dataset for LLM Persona Evaluation and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02343/) (2025)
- [Thinking Before Speaking: A Role-playing Model with Mindset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13752/) (2024)
- [Guess What I am Thinking: A Benchmark for Inner Thought Reasoning of Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08193/) (2025)
- [Moral Susceptibility and Robustness under Persona Role-Play in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08565/) (2025)
- [Reinforcing Human Behavior Simulation via Verbal Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20506/) (2026)
- [FURINA: A Fully Customizable Role-Playing Benchmark via Scalable Multi-Agent Collaboration Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06800/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04075/) (2026)
- [Inertia in Moral and Value Judgments of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09049/) (2024)
- [PersonaAgent with GraphRAG: Community-Aware Knowledge Graphs for Personalized LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17467/) (2025)
- [HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10198/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Persona Following at Decoding Time via Dynamic Importance Estimation for Role-Playing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01438/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13544/) (2026)
- [CharacterBench: Benchmarking Character Customization of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11912/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Capture Human Risk Preferences? A Cross-Cultural Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23107/) (2025)
- [Synthia: Scalable Grounded Persona Generation from Social Media Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14922/) (2025)
- [Understanding Generalization in Role-Playing Models via Information Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17270/) (2025)
- [Agentopia: Long-Term Life Simulation and Learning in Agent Societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07513/) (2026)
- [TRACE Bench: Task-driven Roleplay Agentic Checklist Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11236/) (2026)
- [PsyAgent: Constructing Human-like Agents Based on Psychological Modeling and Contextual Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06158/) (2026)
- [Through the Lens of Character: Resolving Modality-Role Interference in Multimodal Role-Playing Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09443/) (2026)
- [Soul Computing: A Theoretical Framework and Technical Architecture for Intelligent Agents with Independent Consciousness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10413/) (2026)

## 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.