mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Beyond Demographics: Aligning Role-playing LLM-based Agents Using Human Belief Networks

arXiv 2406.17232 ↗First posted 25 Jun 2024cs.CLcited by 39

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Creating human-like large language model (LLM) agents is crucial for faithful social simulation. Having LLMs role-play based on demographic information sometimes improves human likeness but often does not. This study assessed whether LLM alignment with human behavior can be improved by integrating information from empirically-derived human belief networks. Using data from a human survey, we estimated a belief network encompassing 64 topics loading on nine non-overlapping latent factors. We then seeded LLM-based agents with an opinion on one topic, and assessed the alignment of its expressed opinions on remaining test topics with corresponding human data. Role-playing based on demographic information alone did not align LLM and human opinions, but seeding the agent with a single belief greatly improved alignment for topics related in the belief network, and not for topics outside the network. These results suggest a novel path for human-LLM belief alignment in work seeking to simulate and understand patterns of belief distributions in society.

Key facts. Cited by 39 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 11 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2024.

Builds on

11 of 26 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Systematic Biases in LLM Simulations of Debates6 Feb
  2. 2023The Wisdom of Partisan Crowds: Comparing Collective Intelligence in Humans and LLM-based Agents16 Nov
  3. 2023Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Networks of LLM-based Agents16 Nov
  4. 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing16 Oct
  5. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior7 Apr

Other references · 6

  1. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
  2. 2023Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 759
  3. 2022Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samplescited by 737
  4. 2022Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systemscited by 300
  5. 2023From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Modelscited by 257
  6. 2024Random Silicon Sampling: Simulating Human Sub-Population Opinion Using a Large Language Model Based on Group-Level Demographic Informationcited by 48

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 7; 2025: 19; 2026: 13.

39 papers.

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  1. 2024From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 76
  2. 2024Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of Large Language Modelscited by 58
  3. 2025Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profilescited by 38
  4. 2025OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulationcited by 26
  5. 2024No Preference Left Behind: Group Distributional Preference Optimizationcited by 21
  6. 2024Toward LLM-Agent-Based Modeling of Transportation Systems: A Conceptual Frameworkcited by 19
  7. 2025Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamicscited by 19
  8. 2025LLM-Based Social Simulations Require a Boundarycited by 11
  9. 2025Humanizing LLMs: A Survey of Psychological Measurements with Tools, Datasets, and Human-Agent Applicationscited by 10
  10. 2025United Minds or Isolated Agents? Exploring Coordination of LLMs under Cognitive Load Theorycited by 10
  11. 2025Breaking Bad Tokens: Detoxification of LLMs Using Sparse Autoencoderscited by 8
  12. 2025Aligning LLM with human travel choices: a persona-based embedding learning approachcited by 7
27 more
  1. 2024PersLLM: A Personified Training Approach for Large Language Modelscited by 6
  2. 2024Political Actor Agent: Simulating Legislative System for Roll Call Votes Prediction with Large Language Modelscited by 6
  3. 2025HARBOR: Exploring Persona Dynamics in Multi-Agent Competitioncited by 6
  4. 2025Wide-Horizon Thinking and Simulation-Based Evaluation for Real-World LLM Planning with Multifaceted Constraintscited by 6
  5. 2025Large Language Models as Psychological Simulators: A Methodological Guidecited by 6
  6. 2025PersonaTwin: A Multi-Tier Prompt Conditioning Framework for Generating and Evaluating Personalized Digital Twinscited by 5
  7. 2025DEBATE: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Evaluating Opinion Dynamics in Role-Playing LLM Agentscited by 5
  8. 2024Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don't mimic the full human distributioncited by 4
  9. 2025Bridging Language Models and Financial Analysiscited by 4
  10. 2026Persona-aware and Explainable Bikeability Assessment: A Vision-Language Model Approachcited by 4
  11. 2026Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbookcited by 4
  12. 2025ORPP: Self-Optimizing Role-playing Prompts to Enhance Language Model Capabilitiescited by 3
  13. 2025Evaluating Steering Techniques using Human Similarity Judgmentscited by 2
  14. 2025Bias-Adjusted LLM Agents for Human-Like Decision-Making via Behavioral Economicscited by 2
  15. 2025Can Lessons From Human Teams Be Applied to Multi-Agent Systems? The Role of Structure, Diversity, and Interaction Dynamicscited by 2
  16. 2026PrivacyReasoner: Can LLM Emulate a Human-like Privacy Mind?cited by 2
  17. 2026From Plausible to Causal: Counterfactual Semantics for Policy Evaluation in Simulated Online Communitiescited by 2
  18. 2025IROTE: Human-like Traits Elicitation of Large Language Model via In-Context Self-Reflective Optimizationcited by 1
  19. 2026Belief-Sim: Towards Belief-Driven Simulation of Demographic Misinformation Susceptibilitycited by 1
  20. 2026SimPersona: Learning Discrete Buyer Personas from Raw Clickstreams for Grounded E-Commerce Agentscited by 1
  21. 2026Is He Extroverted? Identifying Missing Relevant Personas for Faithful User Simulationcited by 0
  22. 2026Cross-Cultural Simulation of Citizen Emotional Responses to Bureaucratic Red Tape Using LLM Agentscited by 0
  23. 2026Can LLMs Emulate Human Belief Dynamics?cited by 0
  24. 2026A Model of Multi-turn Human Persuadability Using Probabilistic Belief Tracingcited by 0
  25. 2026Staying with the Uncertainty: Uncertainty-Scaffolding Strategies for Artificial Moral Advisors in LLM-to-LLM Simulated Conversationscited by 0
  26. 2026Before You Poll with LLMs: A Deliberative Diagnostic Frameworkcited by 0
  27. 2026Where Do Test-Time Scaling and Training Fall Short in Individual Stance Prediction?cited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Are LLMs Socially Adaptive? Contrasting Belief Evolution in Large Language Models and Humans
  2. 2025Collaborate, Deliberate, Evaluate: How LLM Alignment Affects Coordinated Multi-Agent Outcomes
  3. 2024Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs
  4. 2025Can Finetuing LLMs on Small Human Samples Increase Heterogeneity, Alignment, and Belief-Action Coherence?
  5. 2025Population-Aligned Persona Generation for LLM-based Social Simulation
  6. 2025Do Role-Playing Agents Practice What They Preach? Belief-Behavior Consistency in LLM-Based Simulations of Human Trust
  7. 2025From the Fluency Fallacy to the Micro-to-Macro Validity Gap: Opportunities and Pitfalls of LLMs in Social Simulation
  8. 2024Self-Alignment of Large Language Models via Monopolylogue-based Social Scene Simulation