Beyond Fixed Psychological Personas: State Beats Trait, but Language Models are State-Blind
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Abstract (arXiv)
User interactions with language models vary due to static properties of the user (trait) and the specific context of the interaction (state). However, existing persona datasets (like PersonaChat, PANDORA etc.) capture only trait, and ignore the impact of state. We introduce Chameleon, a dataset of 5,001 contextual psychological profiles from 1,667 Reddit users, each measured across multiple contexts. Using the Chameleon dataset, we present three key findings. First, inspired by Latent State-Trait theory, we decompose variance and find that 74% is within-person(state) while only 26% is between-person (trait). Second, we find that LLMs are state-blind: they focus on trait only, and produce similar responses regardless of state. Third, we find that reward models react to user state, but inconsistently: different models favor or penalize the same users in opposite directions. We release Chameleon to support research on affective computing, personalized dialogue, and RLHF alignment.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 20 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.
Builds on
20 of 61 references.
References · 20
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
- 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 3,050
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- 2022Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluationscited by 836
- 2018Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?cited by 828
- 2023LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalizationcited by 437
- 2023Understanding the Effects of RLHF on LLM Generalisation and Diversitycited by 396
- 2023Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Taskscited by 292
- 2023A Long Way to Go: Investigating Length Correlations in RLHFcited by 291
- 2023PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traitscited by 234
- 2023Evaluating Large Language Models in Theory of Mind Taskscited by 222
- 2022Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMscited by 220
8 more
- 2023"Kelly is a Warm Person, Joseph is a Role Model": Gender Biases in LLM-Generated Reference Letterscited by 199
- 2023Does Writing with Language Models Reduce Content Diversity?cited by 192
- 2020Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilitiescited by 182
- 2023Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 163
- 2019Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Gamecited by 122
- 2024PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignmentcited by 73
- 2020PANDORA Talks: Personality and Demographics on Redditcited by 40
- 2025Towards Reward Fairness in RLHF: From a Resource Allocation Perspectivecited by 9
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026HorizonBench: Long-Horizon Personalization with Evolving Preferencescited by 17
- 2026PHASE-Tree: Modeling Character-State Evolution in Long-Horizon Role-Playing Dialoguecited by 1
- 2026Large Language Models Should Learn Personalized Rather Than Aggregated Human Preferencescited by 0
- 2026Emergi-PersonaOS: A Persona Agent Operating System for Situational Adaptation and Controllable Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026Emergi-PersonaOS: A Persona Agent Operating System for Situational Adaptation and Controllable Evolution23 Sep 2026
- 2026PHASE-Tree: Modeling Character-State Evolution in Long-Horizon Role-Playing Dialogue7 Aug 2026
- 2026Large Language Models Should Learn Personalized Rather Than Aggregated Human Preferences30 May 2026
- 2026HorizonBench: Long-Horizon Personalization with Evolving Preferences19 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2025Improving Language Model Personas via Rationalization with Psychological Scaffolds
- 2026What Models Express, Suppress, and Resist: Auditing Open-Weight LLMs with Persona Vectors
- 2025Us-vs-Them bias in Large Language Models ↗
- 2026Invisible Influences: Investigating Implicit Intersectional Biases through Persona Engineering in Large Language Models
- 2025Whose Personae? Synthetic Persona Experiments in LLM Research and Pathways to Transparency
- 2024LLM Agents in Interaction: Measuring Personality Consistency and Linguistic Alignment in Interacting Populations of Large Language Models