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ACL Findings2025

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

Rui Li, Heming Xia, Xinfeng Yuan, Qingxiu Dong, Lei Sha, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui

Abstract

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 decisionmaking, 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 BEHAVIOR-CHAIN, 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. Resources are available at https://github.com/O- L1RU1/BehaviorChain.

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Cited by top-tier papers1

  1. HalluCitation Matters: Revealing the Impact of Hallucinated References with 300 Hallucinated Papers in ACL ConferencesYusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro WatanabeACL 2026 · 18 citations

Builds on10

  1. Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human BehaviorJoon Sung Park, Joseph C. O'Brien, Carrie Jun Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris et al.UIST 2023 · 1,882 citations
  2. RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language ModelsNoah Wang, Zhongyuan Peng, Haoran Que, Jiaheng Liu et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 120 citations
  3. Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-PlayingYunfan Shao, Linyang Li, Junqi Dai, Xipeng QiuEMNLP 2023 · 97 citations
  4. HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM PersonalizationYuchen Zhuang, Haotian Sun, Yue Yu, Rushi Qiang et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 79 citations
  5. PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMsVinay Samuel, Henry Peng Zou, Yue Zhou, Shreyas Chaudhari et al.EMNLP Findings 2025 · 11 citations

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