From Memory to Behavior: A Behavior-Aware Role-Playing Framework for Social Media Influencers

Ji-Lun Peng, Yi-Zhen Zhang, Chun-Nan Chou, Yun-Nung Chen


Abstract
Large language models have shown strong potential as role-playing agents for real individuals, yet faithful impersonating remains challenging. Existing in-context learning-based methods fail to capture how individuals react under different situations. In addition, LLM-based evaluation is difficult for obscure individuals. To address these challenges, we propose Situation–Internal state–Behavior Persona method to incorporate situation-dependent behavioral strategies. We further design an evaluation protocol that provides LLM evaluators with references about the impersonated individual. We evaluate our approach on a newly constructed dataset for the task of generating replies on social media. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art ICL-based baselines, while our evaluation protocol achieves moderate correlation with human judgment. Besides, experiments on fictional-character benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method is applicable beyond the social media setting. These findings suggest that incorporating behavioral information broadly improves the fidelity of role-playing for real individuals on social media or fictional characters
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.745
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15675–15707
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.745/
DOI:
10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.745
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ji-Lun Peng, Yi-Zhen Zhang, Chun-Nan Chou, and Yun-Nung Chen. 2026. From Memory to Behavior: A Behavior-Aware Role-Playing Framework for Social Media Influencers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 15675–15707, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Memory to Behavior: A Behavior-Aware Role-Playing Framework for Social Media Influencers (Peng et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.745.pdf