Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization

Yu-Min Tseng, Yu-Chao Huang, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Wei-Lin Chen, Chao-Wei Huang, Yu Meng, Yun-Nung Chen


Abstract
The concept of persona, originally adopted in dialogue literature, has re-surged as a promising framework for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific context (e.g., personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge). However, the growing research on leveraging persona in LLMs is relatively disorganized and lacks a systematic taxonomy. To close the gap, we present a comprehensive survey to categorize the current state of the field. We identify two lines of research, namely (1) LLM Role-Playing, where personas are assigned to LLMs, and (2) LLM Personalization, where LLMs take care of user personas. Additionally, we introduce existing methods for LLM personality evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first survey for role-playing and personalization in LLMs under the unified view of persona. We continuously maintain a paper collection to foster future endeavors.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.969
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16612–16631
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.969/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.969
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu-Min Tseng, Yu-Chao Huang, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Wei-Lin Chen, Chao-Wei Huang, Yu Meng, and Yun-Nung Chen. 2024. Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 16612–16631, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization (Tseng et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.969.pdf