InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews

Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao


Abstract
Role-playing agents (RPAs), powered by large language models, have emerged as a flourishing field of applications. However, a key challenge lies in assessing whether RPAs accurately reproduce the personas of target characters, namely their character fidelity. Existing methods mainly focus on the knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. This paper, instead, introduces a novel perspective to evaluate the personality fidelity of RPAs with psychological scales. Overcoming drawbacks of previous self-report assessments on RPAs, we propose InCharacter, namely **In**terviewing **Character** agents for personality tests. Experiments include various types of RPAs and LLMs, covering 32 distinct characters on 14 widely used psychological scales. The results validate the effectiveness of InCharacter in measuring RPA personalities. Then, with InCharacter, we show that state-of-the-art RPAs exhibit personalities highly aligned with the human-perceived personalities of the characters, achieving an accuracy up to 80.7%.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.102
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1840–1873
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.102
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, and Yanghua Xiao. 2024. InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1840–1873, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.102.pdf