mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization

arXiv 2406.01171 ↗First posted 3 Jun 2024cs.CLcited by 203

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Cited by 49 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

The concept of persona, originally adopted in dialogue literature, has re-surged as a promising framework for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific context (e.g., personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge). However, the growing research on leveraging persona in LLMs is relatively disorganized and lacks a systematic taxonomy. To close the gap, we present a comprehensive survey to categorize the current state of the field. We identify two lines of research, namely (1) LLM Role-Playing, where personas are assigned to LLMs, and (2) LLM Personalization, where LLMs take care of user personas. Additionally, we introduce existing methods for LLM personality evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first survey for role-playing and personalization in LLMs under the unified view of persona. We continuously maintain a paper collection to foster future endeavors: https://github.com/MiuLab/PersonaLLM-Survey

Key facts. Cited by 203 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 143 of its 232 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2024.

Builds on

143 of 232 references.

References · 143

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
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  3. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  4. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
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38 more
  1. 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,761
  2. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
  3. 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,348
  4. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
  5. 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,324
  6. 2019PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answeringcited by 1,271
  7. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
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  9. 2023Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluatorscited by 1,050
  10. 2018Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?cited by 820
  11. 2018MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modellingcited by 760
  12. 2023Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?cited by 729
  13. 2023ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debatecited by 724
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  16. 2023AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviorscited by 580
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  20. 2020SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformerscited by 426
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  34. 2023Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Modelscited by 278
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  38. 2016Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documentscited by 223

50 most cited of 143 All 143 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 19; 2025: 101; 2026: 83.

203 papers.

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  1. 2025Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scalecited by 163
  2. 2025WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 162
  3. 2025In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agentscited by 102
  4. 2024PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMscited by 89
  5. 2025PersonaMem-v2: Towards Personalized Intelligence via Learning Implicit User Personas and Agentic Memorycited by 82
  6. 2025LLM Generated Persona is a Promise with a Catchcited by 77
  7. 2025A Survey of Personalized Large Language Models: Progress and Future Directionscited by 65
  8. 2024Large Language Models Empowered Personalized Web Agentscited by 64
  9. 2024Towards Lifelong Dialogue Agents via Timeline-based Memory Managementcited by 50
  10. 2025The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for Large Language Modelscited by 40
  11. 2025Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profilescited by 38
  12. 2026Lost in Simulation: LLM-Simulated Users are Unreliable Proxies for Human Users in Agentic Evaluationscited by 36
38 more
  1. 2024AutoTrust: Benchmarking Trustworthiness in Large Vision Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 35
  2. 2025The Personality Illusion: Revealing Dissociation Between Self-Reports & Behavior in LLMscited by 35
  3. 2024Human and LLM Biases in Hate Speech Annotations: A Socio-Demographic Analysis of Annotators and Targetscited by 31
  4. 2025Fraud-R1 : A Multi-Round Benchmark for Assessing the Robustness of LLM Against Augmented Fraud and Phishing Inducementscited by 31
  5. 2024LLMs are Biased Teachers: Evaluating LLM Bias in Personalized Educationcited by 28
  6. 2024Exploring Safety-Utility Trade-Offs in Personalized Language Modelscited by 26
  7. 2024Social Science Meets LLMs: How Reliable Are Large Language Models in Social Simulations?cited by 26
  8. 2025CARES: Comprehensive Evaluation of Safety and Adversarial Robustness in Medical LLMscited by 26
  9. 2024Examining Identity Drift in Conversations of LLM Agentscited by 25
  10. 2025A Survey on Personalized and Pluralistic Preference Alignment in Large Language Modelscited by 25
  11. 2025Multi-Agent Simulator Drives Language Models for Legal Intensive Interactioncited by 22
  12. 2025Teaching Language Models to Evolve with Users: Dynamic Profile Modeling for Personalized Alignmentcited by 22
  13. 2025AnnaAgent: Dynamic Evolution Agent System with Multi-Session Memory for Realistic Seeker Simulationcited by 21
  14. 2025CUPID: Evaluating Personalized and Contextualized Alignment of LLMs from Interactionscited by 20
  15. 2025Whose Boat Does it Float? Improving Personalization in Preference Tuning via Inferred User Personascited by 17
  16. 2025VITAL: A New Dataset for Benchmarking Pluralistic Alignment in Healthcarecited by 17
  17. 2025Evaluating Personalized Tool-Augmented LLMs from the Perspectives of Personalization and Proactivitycited by 17
  18. 2025How to Protect Yourself from 5G Radiation? Investigating LLM Responses to Implicit Misinformationcited by 17
  19. 2025SOTOPIA-Omega: Dynamic Strategy Injection Learning and Social Instruction Following Evaluation for Social Agentscited by 16
  20. 2025Personality Vector: Modulating Personality of Large Language Models by Model Mergingcited by 16
  21. 2025Can LLM Agents Maintain a Persona in Discourse?cited by 15
  22. 2025Reasoning Does Not Necessarily Improve Role-Playing Abilitycited by 14
  23. 2024The Impact of Prompt Programming on Function-Level Code Generationcited by 13
  24. 2025The Lock-in Hypothesis: Stagnation by Algorithmcited by 11
  25. 2026VitaBench 2.0: Evaluating Personalized and Proactive Agents in Long-Term User Interactionscited by 11
  26. 2024Fairness Testing of Large Language Models in Role-Playingcited by 10
  27. 2025RMTBench: Benchmarking LLMs Through Multi-Turn User-Centric Role-Playingcited by 10
  28. 2025Catch Me If You Can? Not Yet: LLMs Still Struggle to Imitate the Implicit Writing Styles of Everyday Authorscited by 10
  29. 2025ProPerSim: Developing Proactive and Personalized AI Assistants through User-Assistant Simulationcited by 10
  30. 2026Toward Personalized LLM-Powered Agents: Foundations, Evaluation, and Future Directionscited by 10
  31. 2024Revealing and Mitigating the Challenge of Detecting Character Knowledge Errors in LLM Role-Playingcited by 9
  32. 2025Beyond Profile: From Surface-Level Facts to Deep Persona Simulation in LLMscited by 9
  33. 2025Boosting Relational Deep Learning with Pretrained Tabular Modelscited by 9
  34. 2025Exploring Persona-dependent LLM Alignment for the Moral Machine Experimentcited by 9
  35. 2025Evaluating Large Language Models as Expert Annotatorscited by 9
  36. 2025The Inadequacy of Offline LLM Evaluations: A Need to Account for Personalization in Model Behaviorcited by 8
  37. 2025Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humanscited by 8
  38. 2025IMPROVE: Iterative Model Pipeline Refinement and Optimization Leveraging LLM Expertscited by 7

50 most cited of 203 All 203 (JSON)