Persona Prompting in Multimodal Urban Perception: Descriptive Convergence and Interpretive Variation

Neemias B da Silva, Matt Ratto, Myriam Delgado, Rodrigo Minetto, Daniel Silver, Thiago H. Silva


Abstract
This study examines how persona prompting shapes language generated by two multimodal large language models in urban perception, a setting for examining subjective interpretations of shared visual evidence. We organize outputs into three functional layers: descriptive grounding (captions), intermediate semantic layer (perception tags), and interpretive framing (justifications). Using approximately 60,000 persona-conditioned annotations from each of two MLLMs, Qwen3-VL and Gemma4, we find that captions converge strongly across persona profiles and show only small attribute-associated differences. Justifications vary substantially more: economic status produces the largest difference in both models, with political orientation and personality also prominent. Paired image-level comparisons confirm larger justification than caption differences for these three attributes. For perception tags, personas sharing the same attribute level produce more similar tag sets than personas with different attribute levels, with the largest separation observed for economic status. Exploratory topic analysis further suggests persona-specific evaluative emphasis. Across models, profile-pair similarity patterns are strongly correlated for all three output types, although agreement is lowest for justifications. Overall, persona prompting affects interpretive framing more strongly than descriptive grounding.
Anthology ID:
2026.pandora-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Pluralistic AI NLP: Diversity-aware, Sociotechnical, Responsible Alignment (PANDORA 2026)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Shanshan Xu, Santosh T.Y.S.S., Kemal Kurniawan, Siyao Peng, Sarenne Wallbridge, Fajri Koto, Nouha Dziri, Barbara Plank
Venues:
PANDORA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
301–318
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.pandora-1.17/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neemias B da Silva, Matt Ratto, Myriam Delgado, Rodrigo Minetto, Daniel Silver, and Thiago H. Silva. 2026. Persona Prompting in Multimodal Urban Perception: Descriptive Convergence and Interpretive Variation. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Pluralistic AI NLP: Diversity-aware, Sociotechnical, Responsible Alignment (PANDORA 2026), pages 301–318, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Persona Prompting in Multimodal Urban Perception: Descriptive Convergence and Interpretive Variation (da Silva et al., PANDORA 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.pandora-1.17.pdf