# How Far are LLMs from Being Our Digital Twins? A Benchmark for Persona-Based Behavior Chain Simulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14642/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05459/) (2024)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17976/) (2023)
- [CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01275/) (2024)
- [Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19226/) (2024)
- [Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05925/) (2024)
- [PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18416/) (2024)
- [Conversational Health Agents: A Personalized LLM-Powered Agent Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02374/) (2023)
- [Planning, Creation, Usage: Benchmarking LLMs for Comprehensive Tool Utilization in Real-World Complex Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17167/) (2024)
- [Personalized Pieces: Efficient Personalized Large Language Models through Collaborative Efforts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10471/) (2024)
- [CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10278/) (2023)
- [Neeko: Leveraging Dynamic LoRA for Efficient Multi-Character Role-Playing Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13717/) (2024)
- [Y Social: an LLM-powered Social Media Digital Twin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00818/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12726/) (2024)
- [CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05631/) (2024)
- [ElectionSim: Massive Population Election Simulation Powered by Large Language Model Driven Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20746/) (2024)
- [Character is Destiny: Can Role-Playing Language Agents Make Persona-Driven Decisions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12138/) (2024)
- [Personalized LLM Response Generation with Parameterized Memory Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03565/) (2024)
- [LiveChat: A Large-Scale Personalized Dialogue Dataset Automatically Constructed from Live Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08401/) (2023)
- [Integrating Digital Twin and Advanced Intelligent Technologies to Realize the Metaverse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04606/) (2022)
- [ComperDial: Commonsense Persona-grounded Dialogue Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11228/) (2024)
- [Applying Digital Twins in Metaverse: User Interface, Security and Privacy Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11343/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [TwinVoice: A Multi-dimensional Benchmark Towards Digital Twins via LLM Persona Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25536/) (2025)
- [A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16939/) (2025)
- [MatrAIx: Simulating the World with 8.3 Billion Persona Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04205/) (2026)
- [Persona-Based Synthetic Data Generation Using Multi-Stage Conditioning with Large Language Models for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13380/) (2025)
- [The Behavioral Fabric of LLM-Powered GUI Agents: Human Values and Interaction Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16356/) (2026)
- [When Can Digital Personas Reliably Approximate Human Survey Findings?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10659/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking Chinese Medical LLMs: A Medbench-based Analysis of Performance Gaps and Hierarchical Optimization Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07306/) (2025)
- [ArcANE: Do Role-Playing Language Agents Stay in Character at the Right Time?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05553/) (2026)
- [Imperfectly Cooperative Human-AI Interactions: Comparing the Impacts of Human and AI Attributes in Simulated and User Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15607/) (2026)
- [PersonaDrift: A Benchmark for Temporal Anomaly Detection in Language-Based Dementia Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16445/) (2025)
- [Personalized Prediction of Perceived Message Effectiveness Using Large Language Model Based Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19403/) (2026)
- [Can LLMs Emulate Human Belief Dynamics?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18781/) (2026)
- [BehaviorBench: Modeling Real-World User Decisions from Behavioral Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02798/) (2026)
- [Learning Cardiac Electrophysiology Digital Twins Through Agentic Discovery of Hybrid Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18154/) (2026)
- [Turning Intent into Specifications: A Benchmark and an Interactive User-Assistant Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20585/) (2026)
- [The Severance Problem: LLMs are Unaware of the Person Beyond the Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14250/) (2026)
- [A Persona-based Rate Action Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26545/) (2026)
- [Inverse Theory of Mind Modeling for Content Recommendation: From Web Browsing to Dynamic Intelligent Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11354/) (2026)
- [mimeo: Compiling Public Expert Corpora into Agent Skills and Testing What Transfers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00453/) (2026)
- [Measuring the Behavioral Fidelity of Long-Horizon Human Activity Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01257/) (2026)
- [AnthroDial: Benchmarking LLM Anthropomorphism in Autonomous Social Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37853/) (2026)
- [Pincer: Resource Authorization for Agents using a Digital Twin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02569/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, LLMs have garnered increasing attention across academic disciplines for their potential as human digital twins, virtual proxies designed to replicate individuals and autonomously perform tasks such as decision-making, problem-solving, and reasoning on their behalf. However, current evaluations of LLMs primarily emphasize dialogue simulation while overlooking human behavior simulation, which is crucial for digital twins. To address this gap, we introduce BehaviorChain, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to simulate continuous human behavior. BehaviorChain comprises diverse, high-quality, persona-based behavior chains, totaling 15,846 distinct behaviors across 1,001 unique personas, each with detailed history and profile metadata. For evaluation, we integrate persona metadata into LLMs and employ them to iteratively infer contextually appropriate behaviors within dynamic scenarios provided by BehaviorChain. Comprehensive evaluation results demonstrated that even state-of-the-art models struggle with accurately simulating continuous human behavior.