# Decoding the Human Factor: High Fidelity Behavioral Prediction for Strategic Foresight

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17222 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17222/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Found in the Middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16008/) (2024)
- [SimBench: Benchmarking the Ability of Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17516/) (2025)
- [Examining Identity Drift in Conversations of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00804/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Nous: An Attempt to Extract and Inject the Cognition Behind Prediction-Market Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13038/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting human decision-making in high-stakes environments remains a central challenge for artificial intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong general reasoning, they often struggle to generate consistent, individual-specific behavior, particularly when accurate prediction depends on complex interactions between psychological traits and situational constraints. Prompting-based approaches can be brittle in this setting, exhibiting identity drift and limited ability to leverage increasingly detailed persona descriptions. To address these limitations, we introduce the Large Behavioral Model (LBM), a behavioral foundation model fine-tuned to predict individual strategic choices with high fidelity. LBM shifts from transient persona prompting to behavioral embedding by conditioning on a structured, high-dimensional trait profile derived from a comprehensive psychometric battery. Trained on a proprietary dataset linking stable dispositions, motivational states, and situational constraints to observed choices, LBM learns to map rich psychological profiles to discrete actions across diverse strategic dilemmas. In a held-out scenario evaluation, LBM fine-tuning improves behavioral prediction relative to the unadapted Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct backbone and performs comparably to frontier baselines when conditioned on Big Five traits. Moreover, we find that while prompting-based baselines exhibit a complexity ceiling, LBM continues to benefit from increasingly dense trait profiles, with performance improving as additional trait dimensions are provided. Together, these results establish LBM as a scalable approach for high-fidelity behavioral simulation, enabling applications in strategic foresight, negotiation analysis, cognitive security, and decision support.