Deep Persona: 3-layer psych-grounded architecture makes LLM role-playing agents more humanlike

UoHaifa · hf · 2026-09-22

University of Haifa researchers introduce Deep Persona, addressing the problem that shallow character descriptions fail to sustain coherent behavior in long LLM role-play. The architecture organizes personas into three hierarchical layers—observable expression, latent beliefs, and core motivational drives—governed by scripted determinism and bounded agency, turning the model into a reactive engine guided by a structured internal script.

They also propose a reference-free evaluation framework that benchmarks dialogue naturalness against empirical human distributions using clinical psychological instruments and adversarial stress-tests. Findings: LLMs show high pragmatic fluency but systematic deficits in emotional expression and joint attention; case studies show structured personas produce more humanlike conversations.

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