Bangde Du
Author directory2026
TwinVoice: A Multi-dimensional Benchmark Towards Digital Twins via LLM Persona Simulation
Bangde Du | Minghao Guo | Songming He | Ziyi Ye | Xi Zhu | Weihang Su | Shuqi Zhu | Yujia Zhou | Yongfeng Zhang | Qingyao Ai | Yiqun Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Bangde Du | Minghao Guo | Songming He | Ziyi Ye | Xi Zhu | Weihang Su | Shuqi Zhu | Yujia Zhou | Yongfeng Zhang | Qingyao Ai | Yiqun Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) are exhibiting emergent human-like abilities and are envisioned as the tool for simulating an individual’s communication patterns, behaviors, and personality traits. However, current evaluations of LLM-based persona simulation remain limited: most rely on synthetic dialogues and lack fine-grained analysis of the capability for persona simulation. To address these limitations, we introduce TwinVoice, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing persona simulation across diverse real-world contexts. TwinVoice encompasses three dimensions: Social Persona (public social interactions), Interpersonal Persona (private dialogues), and Narrative Persona (role-based expression). It further decomposes the evaluation into six fundamental capabilities, including opinion consistency, memory recall, logical reasoning, lexical fidelity, persona tone, and syntactic style. Experimental results reveal that while advanced models achieve moderate accuracy in persona simulation, they still fall short of capabilities such as syntactic style and memory recall. Our data, code, and evaluation results are available.
Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift
Weihang Su | Jiacheng Kang | Jingyan Xu | Qingyao Ai | Jianming Long | Hanwen Zhang | Bangde Du | Xinyuan Cao | Min Zhang | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Weihang Su | Jiacheng Kang | Jingyan Xu | Qingyao Ai | Jianming Long | Hanwen Zhang | Bangde Du | Xinyuan Cao | Min Zhang | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters inevitably accumulates weight drift, which causes catastrophic forgetting and degrades general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that ReGrad outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.
2025
SimVBG: Simulating Individual Values by Backstory Generation
Bangde Du | Ziyi Ye | Zhijing Wu | Monika A. Jankowska | Shuqi Zhu | Qingyao Ai | Yujia Zhou | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Bangde Du | Ziyi Ye | Zhijing Wu | Monika A. Jankowska | Shuqi Zhu | Qingyao Ai | Yujia Zhou | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly strong human-like capabilities, the need to align them with human values has become significant. Recent advanced techniques, such as prompt learning and reinforcement learning, are being employed to bring LLMs closer to aligning with human values. While these techniques address broad ethical and helpfulness concerns, they rarely consider simulating individualized human values. To bridge this gap, we propose SimVBG, a framework that simulates individual values based on individual backstories that reflect their past experience and demographic information. SimVBG transforms structured data on an individual to a backstory and utilizes a multi-module architecture inspired by the Cognitive–Affective Personality System to simulate individual value based on the backstories. We test SimVBG on a self-constructed benchmark derived from the World Values Survey and show that SimVBG improves top-1 accuracy by more than 10% over the retrieval-augmented generation method. Further analysis shows that performance increases as additional interaction user history becomes available, indicating that the model can refine its persona over time. Code, dataset, and complete experimental results are available at https://github.com/bangdedadi/SimVBG.