Paper Detail

Deep Persona: A Psychologically Grounded Architecture and Evaluation Framework for Role-Playing Agents and Simulations

Rotem Dror, Zohar Elyoseph, Yuval Haber, Elad Refoua, Oshrat Ayalon, Adir Solomon

huggingface Score 15.0

Published 2026-09-06 · First seen 2026-09-22

General AI

Abstract

Existing approaches to persona simulation with Large Language Models (LLMs) mostly rely on shallow character descriptions that fail to sustain coherent character behavior across extended interactions. We introduce Deep Persona, a psychologically grounded, three-layered architecture that organizes personas into hierarchical levels of observable expression, latent beliefs, and core motivational drives, for constructing highly convincing role-playing agents. Governed by the principles of scripted determinism and bounded agency, the architecture restricts the model to a reactive engine guided by a structured internal script. We further propose a reference-free evaluation framework that benchmarks dialogue naturalness against empirical human distributions using established psychological clinical instruments and adversarial stress-tests. Empirical evaluation reveals that while LLMs achieve high pragmatic fluency, they exhibit systematic limitations in emotional expression and joint attention. In addition, we present a case study of two Deep Personas and evaluate them using the proposed framework, demonstrating that structured personas can produce interactions that more closely align with human conversational behavior.

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BibTeX

@misc{dror2026deep,
  title = {Deep Persona: A Psychologically Grounded Architecture and Evaluation Framework for Role-Playing Agents and Simulations},
  author = {Rotem Dror and Zohar Elyoseph and Yuval Haber and Elad Refoua and Oshrat Ayalon and Adir Solomon},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Existing approaches to persona simulation with Large Language Models (LLMs) mostly rely on shallow character descriptions that fail to sustain coherent character behavior across extended interactions. We introduce Deep Persona, a psychologically grounded, three-layered architecture that organizes personas into hierarchical levels of observable expression, latent beliefs, and core motivational drives, for constructing highly convincing role-playing agents. Governed by the principles of scripted d},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.22255},
  keywords = {huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2609.22255},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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