# DPRF: A Generalizable Dynamic Persona Refinement Framework for Optimizing Behavior Alignment Between Personalized LLM Role-Playing Agents and Humans

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

## 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, 30 of 30)

- [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)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02716/) (2024)
- [Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04024/) (2022)
- [LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10109/) (2024)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models in Theory of Mind Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02083/) (2023)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [War and Peace (WarAgent): Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Simulation of World Wars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17227/) (2023)
- [Large language models that replace human participants can harmfully misportray and flatten identity groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01908/) (2024)
- [Can ChatGPT Defend its Belief in Truth? Evaluating LLM Reasoning via Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13160/) (2023)
- [Rethinking LLM Memorization through the Lens of Adversarial Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15146/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Serve as Rational Players in Game Theory? A Systematic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05488/) (2023)
- [The Oscars of AI Theater: A Survey on Role-Playing with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11484/) (2024)
- [Y Social: an LLM-powered Social Media Digital Twin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00818/) (2024)
- [From Role-Play to Drama-Interaction: An LLM Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14231/) (2024)
- [AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02959/) (2024)
- [LLM-based Human Simulations Have Not Yet Been Reliable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08579/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent-as-Judge: Aligning LLM-Agent-Based Automated Evaluation with Multi-Dimensional Human Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21028/) (2025)
- [Conversational flow in Oxford-style debates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03114/) (2016)
- [Towards a Design Guideline for RPA Evaluation: A Survey of Large Language Model-Based Role-Playing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13012/) (2025)
- [An Empathy-Based Sandbox Approach to Bridge the Privacy Gap among Attitudes, Goals, Knowledge, and Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14510/) (2023)
- [Privacy Leakage Overshadowed by Views of AI: A Study on Human Oversight of Privacy in Language Model Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01344/) (2024)
- [UXAgent: A System for Simulating Usability Testing of Web Design with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09407/) (2025)
- [Simulation as Reality? The Effectiveness of LLM-Generated Data in Open-ended Question Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06371/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Me-Agent: A Personalized Mobile Agent with Two-Level User Habit Learning for Enhanced Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20162/) (2026)
- [Memory-Driven Role-Playing: Evaluation and Enhancement of Persona Knowledge Utilization in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19313/) (2026)
- [Assessing Risks of Large Language Models in Mental Health Support: A Framework for Automated Clinical AI Red Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19948/) (2026)
- [From Human-Human Collaboration to Human-Agent Collaboration: A Vision, Design Philosophy, and an Empirical Framework for Achieving Successful Partnerships Between Humans and LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05987/) (2026)
- [Individual Turing Test: A Case Study of LLM-based Simulation Using Longitudinal Personal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01289/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The emerging large language model role-playing agents (LLM RPAs) aim to simulate individual human behaviors, but the persona fidelity is often undermined by manually-created profiles (e.g., cherry-picked information and personality characteristics) without validating the alignment with the target individuals. To address this limitation, our work introduces the Dynamic Persona Refinement Framework (DPRF). DPRF aims to optimize the alignment of LLM RPAs' behaviors with those of target individuals by iteratively identifying the cognitive divergence, either through free-form or theory-grounded, structured analysis, between generated behaviors and human ground truth, and refining the persona profile to mitigate these divergences. We evaluate DPRF with five LLMs on four diverse behavior-prediction scenarios: formal debates, social media posts with mental health issues, public interviews, and movie reviews. DPRF can consistently improve behavioral alignment considerably over baseline personas and generalizes across models and scenarios. Our work provides a robust methodology for creating high-fidelity persona profiles and enhancing the validity of downstream applications, such as user simulation, social studies, and personalized AI.
