# From Pixels to Personas: Investigating and Modeling Self-Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Dialogues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03870 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03870/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [A Survey on In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00234/) (2022)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14375/) (2022)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Programmatic Behavior of LLMs: Dual-Use Through Standard Security Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05733/) (2023)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06083/) (2019)
- [Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07079/) (2020)
- [SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10465/) (2022)
- [ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12688/) (2022)
- [Topical-Chat: Towards Knowledge-Grounded Open-Domain Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11995/) (2023)
- [Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09050/) (2017)
- [MultiDoc2Dial: Modeling Dialogues Grounded in Multiple Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12595/) (2021)
- [DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08877/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias for Neural Dialogue Generation with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13028/) (2020)
- [AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02056/) (2024)
- [DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10172/) (2023)
- [The R-U-A-Robot Dataset: Helping Avoid Chatbot Deception by Detecting User Questions About Human or Non-Human Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02692/) (2021)
- [Improving Open Language Models by Learning from Organic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04707/) (2023)
- [Robots-Dont-Cry: Understanding Falsely Anthropomorphic Utterances in Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12429/) (2022)
- [Healing Unsafe Dialogue Responses with Weak Supervision Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15757/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [HumT DumT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13259/) (2025)
- [Structuring the Space of Sociotechnical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01250/) (2026)
- [Longitudinal Evidence That General-Purpose Chatbots Actively Foster Relational Engagement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10672/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-anthropomorphism in robots manifests itself through their display of human-like characteristics in dialogue, such as expressing preferences and emotions. Our study systematically analyzes self-anthropomorphic expression within various dialogue datasets, outlining the contrasts between self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropomorphic responses in dialogue systems. We show significant differences in these two types of responses and propose transitioning from one type to the other. We also introduce Pix2Persona, a novel dataset aimed at developing ethical and engaging AI systems in various embodiments. This dataset preserves the original dialogues from existing corpora and enhances them with paired responses: self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropomorphic for each original bot response. Our work not only uncovers a new category of bot responses that were previously under-explored but also lays the groundwork for future studies about dynamically adjusting self-anthropomorphism levels in AI systems to align with ethical standards and user expectations.