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EMNLP Findings2025

PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs

Vinay Samuel, Henry Peng Zou, Yue Zhou, Shreyas Chaudhari, Ashwin Kalyan, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ameet Deshpande, Karthik R. Narasimhan, Vishvak Murahari

Abstract

Persona agents, which are LLM agents conditioned to act according to an assigned persona, enable contextually rich and user-aligned interactions across domains like education and healthcare. However, evaluating how faithfully these agents adhere to their personas remains a significant challenge, particularly in freeform settings that demand consistency across diverse, persona-relevant environments. We introduce PersonaGym, the first dynamic evaluation framework for persona agents, and Per-sonaScore, a human-aligned automatic metric grounded in decision theory that enables comprehensive large-scale evaluation. Our evaluation of 10 leading LLMs across 200 personas and 10,000 questions reveals significant advancement opportunities. For example, GPT-4.1 had the exact same PersonaScore as LLAMA-3-8B despite being a more recent and advanced closed-source model. Importantly, increased model size and complexity do not necessarily enhance persona agent capabilities, underscoring the need for algorithmic and architectural innovation toward faithful, performant persona agents. 1 2

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Cited by top-tier papers9

  1. MOA: Multi-Objective Alignment for Role-Playing AgentsChonghua Liao, Ke Wang, Yuchuan Wu, Ruoran Li et al.ACL 2026 · 4 citations
  2. Creativity in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems: A SurveyYi-Cheng Lin, Kang-Chieh Chen, Zhe-Yan Li, Tzu-Heng Wu et al.EMNLP 2025 · 3 citations
  3. Large Language Models Are Involuntary Truth-Tellers: Exploiting Fallacy Failure for Jailbreak AttacksYue Zhou, Henry Peng Zou, Barbara Di Eugenio, Yang ZhangEMNLP 2024 · 3 citations
  4. Exploring Persona Sentiment Sensitivity in Personalized Dialogue GenerationYonghyun Jun, Hwanhee LeeACL 2025
  5. What About the Scene With the Hitler Reference? HAUNT: A Framework to Probe LLMs' Self-consistency in Closed Domains Via Adversarial NudgeArka Dutta, Sujan Dutta, Rijul Magu, Soumyajit Datta et al.ACL 2026

Builds on25

  1. Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use ToolsTimo Schick, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Roberto Dessì, Roberta Raileanu et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 5,989 citations
  2. Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-FeedbackAman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 4,972 citations
  3. G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using Gpt-4 with Better Human AlignmentYang Liu, Dan Iter, Yichong Xu, Shuohang Wang et al.EMNLP 2023 · 549 citations
  4. Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated InstructionsYizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu et al.ACL 2023 · 540 citations
  5. Bias Runs Deep: Implicit Reasoning Biases in Persona-Assigned LLMsShashank Gupta, Vaishnavi Shrivastava, Ameet Deshpande, Ashwin Kalyan et al.ICLR 2024 · 212 citations

Related papers

  1. Consistently Simulating Human Personas with Multi-Turn Reinforcement LearningMarwa Abdulhai, Ryan Cheng, Donovan Clay, Tim Althoff et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 51 citations
  2. PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM AgentsWeizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Liangwei Yang et al.ACL Findings 2026 · 2 citations
  3. PersonaArena: Dynamic Simulation for Evaluating and Enhancing Persona-Level Role-Playing in Large Language ModelsWenlong Shi, Jianxun Lian, Mingqi Wu, Haiming Qin et al.ACL Findings 2026
  4. Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and PersonalizationYu-Min Tseng, Yu-Chao Huang, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Wei-Lin Chen et al.EMNLP Findings 2024 · 87 citations
  5. CAPE: Context-Aware Personality Evaluation Framework for Large Language ModelsJivnesh Sandhan, Fei Cheng, Tushar Sandhan, Yugo MurawakiEMNLP Findings 2025 · 1 citation
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