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Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization
Open accessAbstract
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.1 * Equal contribution. 1 https://github.com/MiuLab/PersonaLLM-Survey
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“However, collecting substantial annotations for training a personalized system for long-term use is hard (Tseng et al., 2024).”
From In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (2025) · cites this paper as Tseng et al., 2024
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“yet their inherent statelessness poses a significant challenge for maintaining coherent, personalized conversations over time (Chen et al., 2024; Li et al., 2024b; Tseng et al., 2024)”
From In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (2025) · cites this paper as Tseng et al., 2024
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- USER:] That is all I need to know. Thanks, goodbye. [SYSTEM:] Thank you so much for Cambridge TownInfo center. Have a great day! Table 5: An example of ToD modeling from the MultiWOZ dataset (Zang et al., 2020).
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Limitations of the LLM-as-a-Judge Approach for Evaluating LLM Outputs in Expert Knowledge Tasks
Szymanski, A., Ziems, N., Eicher-Miller, H. A., Li, T. J.-J., Jiang, M., & Metoyer, R. A. (2025) · Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces · doi:10.1145/3708359.3712091 · Cited by 77
PersonaCraft: Leveraging language models for data-driven persona development
Jung, S., Salminen, J. O., Aldous, K. K., & Jansen, B. J. J. (2025) · International Journal of Human-Computer Studies · doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2025.103445 · Cited by 56
The Impact of Prompt Programming on Function-Level Code Generation
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Principles and Guidelines for the Use of LLM Judges
Dietz, L., Zendel, O., Bailey, P., Clarke, C. L. A., Cotterill, E., Dalton, J., Hasibi, F., Sanderson, M., & Craswell, N. (2025) · ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) · doi:10.1145/3731120.3744588 · Cited by 50
Creating and Evaluating Personas Using Generative AI: A Scoping Review of 81 Articles
Amin, D., Salminen, J. O., Ahmed, F., Tervola, S. M. H., Sethi, S., & Jansen, B. J. J. (2026) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790608 · Cited by 36
Metadata
- Authors
- Tseng, Y.-M., Huang, Y.-C., Hsiao, T.-Y., Chen, W.-L., Huang, C.-W., Meng, Y., & Chen, Y.-N.
- Affiliations
- National Taiwan University (TW)
- Venue
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
- Published
- 2024
- Pages
- 16612-16631
- OpenAlex
- W4404781205
- Cited by
- 87
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 47 · 2025: 35 · 2024: 5
- FWCI
- 25.12
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (Findings of EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- National Taiwan University (113L900902, 113L900903)
- National Science and Technology Council
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Persona Design and Applications
- Keywords
- personas, large language models, LLM personalization, personality assessment, personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge
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