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Mar 13

SimsChat: A Customisable Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess the remarkable capability to understand human instructions and generate high-quality text, enabling them to act as agents that simulate human behaviours. This capability allows LLMs to emulate human beings in a more advanced manner, beyond merely replicating simple human behaviours. However, there is a lack of exploring into leveraging LLMs to craft characters from several aspects. In this work, we introduce the Customisable Conversation Agent Framework, which employs LLMs to simulate real-world characters that can be freely customised according to different user preferences. The customisable framework is helpful for designing customisable characters and role-playing agents according to human's preferences. We first propose the SimsConv dataset, which comprises 68 different customised characters, 1,360 multi-turn role-playing dialogues, and encompasses 13,971 interaction dialogues in total. The characters are created from several real-world elements, such as career, aspiration, trait, and skill. Building on these foundations, we present SimsChat, a freely customisable role-playing agent. It incorporates different real-world scenes and topic-specific character interaction dialogues, simulating characters' life experiences in various scenarios and topic-specific interactions with specific emotions. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves desirable performance and provides helpful guideline for building better simulacra of human beings in the future. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/SimsChat.

CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds

Role-playing is a crucial capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling a wide range of practical applications, including intelligent non-player characters, digital twins, and emotional companions. Evaluating this capability in LLMs is challenging due to the complex dynamics involved in role-playing, such as maintaining character fidelity throughout a storyline and navigating open-ended narratives without a definitive ground truth. Current evaluation methods, which primarily focus on question-answering or conversational snapshots, fall short of adequately capturing the nuanced character traits and behaviors essential for authentic role-playing. In this paper, we propose CharacterBox, which is a simulation sandbox designed to generate situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories. These behavior trajectories enable a more comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of role-playing capabilities. CharacterBox consists of two main components: the character agent and the narrator agent. The character agent, grounded in psychological and behavioral science, exhibits human-like behaviors, while the narrator agent coordinates interactions between character agents and environmental changes. Additionally, we introduce two trajectory-based methods that leverage CharacterBox to enhance LLM performance. To reduce costs and facilitate the adoption of CharacterBox by public communities, we fine-tune two smaller models, CharacterNR and CharacterRM, as substitutes for GPT API calls, and demonstrate their competitive performance compared to advanced GPT APIs.

Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment

Considerable efforts have been invested in augmenting the role-playing proficiency of open-source large language models (LLMs) by emulating proprietary counterparts. Nevertheless, we posit that LLMs inherently harbor role-play capabilities, owing to the extensive knowledge of characters and potential dialogues ingrained in their vast training corpora. Thus, in this study, we introduce Ditto, a self-alignment method for role-play. Ditto capitalizes on character knowledge, encouraging an instruction-following LLM to simulate role-play dialogues as a variant of reading comprehension. This method creates a role-play training set comprising 4,000 characters, surpassing the scale of currently available datasets by tenfold regarding the number of roles. Subsequently, we fine-tune the LLM using this self-generated dataset to augment its role-playing capabilities. Upon evaluating our meticulously constructed and reproducible role-play benchmark and the roleplay subset of MT-Bench, Ditto, in various parameter scales, consistently maintains a consistent role identity and provides accurate role-specific knowledge in multi-turn role-play conversations. Notably, it outperforms all open-source role-play baselines, showcasing performance levels comparable to advanced proprietary chatbots. Furthermore, we present the first comprehensive cross-supervision alignment experiment in the role-play domain, revealing that the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs confine the knowledge within role-play. Meanwhile, the role-play styles can be easily acquired with the guidance of smaller models. We open-source related resources at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/Ditto.

From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted the rise of Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs), i.e., specialized AI systems designed to simulate assigned personas. By harnessing multiple advanced abilities of LLMs, including in-context learning, instruction following, and social intelligence, RPLAs achieve a remarkable sense of human likeness and vivid role-playing performance. RPLAs can mimic a wide range of personas, ranging from historical figures and fictional characters to real-life individuals. Consequently, they have catalyzed numerous AI applications, such as emotional companions, interactive video games, personalized assistants and copilots, and digital clones. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the evolution and recent progress in RPLAs integrating with cutting-edge LLM technologies. We categorize personas into three types: 1) Demographic Persona, which leverages statistical stereotypes; 2) Character Persona, focused on well-established figures; and 3) Individualized Persona, customized through ongoing user interactions for personalized services. We begin by presenting a comprehensive overview of current methodologies for RPLAs, followed by the details for each persona type, covering corresponding data sourcing, agent construction, and evaluation. Afterward, we discuss the fundamental risks, existing limitations, and future prospects of RPLAs. Additionally, we provide a brief review of RPLAs in AI applications, which reflects practical user demands that shape and drive RPLA research. Through this work, we aim to establish a clear taxonomy of RPLA research and applications, and facilitate future research in this critical and ever-evolving field, and pave the way for a future where humans and RPLAs coexist in harmony.

Self-Prompt Tuning: Enable Autonomous Role-Playing in LLMs

Recent advancements in LLMs have showcased their remarkable role-playing capabilities, able to accurately simulate the dialogue styles and cognitive processes of various roles based on different instructions and contexts. Studies indicate that assigning LLMs the roles of experts, a strategy known as role-play prompting, can enhance their performance in the corresponding domains. However, the prompt needs to be manually designed for the given problem, requiring certain expertise and iterative modifications. To this end, we propose self-prompt tuning, making LLMs themselves generate role-play prompts through fine-tuning. Leveraging the LIMA dataset as our foundational corpus, we employ GPT-4 to annotate role-play prompts for each data points, resulting in the creation of the LIMA-Role dataset. We then fine-tune LLMs like Llama-2-7B and Mistral-7B on LIMA-Role. Consequently, the self-prompt tuned LLMs can automatically generate expert role prompts for any given question. We extensively evaluate self-prompt tuned LLMs on widely used NLP benchmarks and open-ended question test. Our empirical results illustrate that self-prompt tuned LLMs outperform standard instruction tuned baselines across most datasets. This highlights the great potential of utilizing fine-tuning to enable LLMs to self-prompt, thereby automating complex prompting strategies. We release the dataset, models, and code at this https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Self-Prompt-Tuning-739E/{url}.

RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following

Role-playing is important for Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow diverse instructions while maintaining role identity and the role's pre-defined ability limits. Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-playing in instruction-following scenarios. We introduce a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, including: (1) Multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages; (2) Role-playing machine reading comprehension, involving response, refusal, and attempts according to passage answerability and role ability; (3) More complex scenarios with nested, multi-turn and prioritized instructions. The final RoleMRC features a 10.2k role profile meta-pool, 37.9k well-synthesized role-playing instructions, and 1.4k testing samples. We develop a pipeline to quantitatively evaluate the fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following capabilities of several mainstream LLMs, as well as models that are fine-tuned on our data. Moreover, cross-evaluation on external role-playing datasets confirms that models fine-tuned on RoleMRC enhances instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities. We also probe the neural-level activation maps of different capabilities over post-tuned LLMs. Access to our RoleMRC, RoleMRC-mix and Codes: https://github.com/LuJunru/RoleMRC.

BEYOND DIALOGUE: A Profile-Dialogue Alignment Framework Towards General Role-Playing Language Model

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized role-playing, enabling the development of general role-playing models. However, current role-playing training has two significant issues: (I) Using a predefined role profile to prompt dialogue training for specific scenarios usually leads to inconsistencies and even conflicts between the dialogue and the profile, resulting in training biases. (II) The model learns to imitate the role based solely on the profile, neglecting profile-dialogue alignment at the sentence level. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework called BEYOND DIALOGUE, designed to overcome these hurdles. This framework innovatively introduces "beyond dialogue" tasks to align dialogue with profile traits based on each specific scenario, thereby eliminating biases during training. Furthermore, by adopting an innovative prompting mechanism that generates reasoning outcomes for training, the framework allows the model to achieve fine-grained alignment between profile and dialogue at the sentence level. The aforementioned methods are fully automated and low-cost. Additionally, the integration of automated dialogue and objective evaluation methods forms a comprehensive framework, paving the way for general role-playing. Experimental results demonstrate that our model excels in adhering to and reflecting various dimensions of role profiles, outperforming most proprietary general and specialized role-playing baselines. All code and datasets are available at https://github.com/yuyouyu32/BeyondDialogue.

Orca: Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models by Integrating Personality Traits

Large language models has catalyzed the development of personalized dialogue systems, numerous role-playing conversational agents have emerged. While previous research predominantly focused on enhancing the model's capability to follow instructions by designing character profiles, neglecting the psychological factors that drive human conversations. In this paper, we propose Orca, a framework for data processing and training LLMs of custom characters by integrating personality traits. Orca comprises four stages: (1) Personality traits inferring, leverage LLMs to infer user's BigFive personality trait reports and scores. (2) Data Augment, simulate user's profile, background story, and psychological activities. (3) Dataset construction, personality-conditioned instruction prompting (PCIP) to stimulate LLMs. (4) Modeling and Training, personality-conditioned instruction tuning (PTIT and PSIT), using the generated data to enhance existing open-source LLMs. We introduce OrcaBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the quality of content generated by LLMs on social platforms across multiple scales. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves superior performance on this benchmark, demonstrating its excellence and effectiveness in perceiving personality traits that significantly improve role-playing abilities. Our Code is available at https://github.com/Aipura/Orca.

Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.

Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting

Modern large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, exhibit a remarkable capacity for role-playing, enabling them to embody not only human characters but also non-human entities like a Linux terminal. This versatility allows them to simulate complex human-like interactions and behaviors within various contexts, as well as to emulate specific objects or systems. While these capabilities have enhanced user engagement and introduced novel modes of interaction, the influence of role-playing on LLMs' reasoning abilities remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a strategically designed role-play prompting methodology and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting across twelve diverse reasoning benchmarks, encompassing arithmetic, commonsense reasoning, symbolic reasoning, and more. Leveraging models such as ChatGPT and Llama 2, our empirical results illustrate that role-play prompting consistently surpasses the standard zero-shot approach across most datasets. Notably, accuracy on AQuA rises from 53.5% to 63.8%, and on Last Letter from 23.8% to 84.2%. Beyond enhancing contextual understanding, we posit that role-play prompting serves as an implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trigger, thereby improving the quality of reasoning. By comparing our approach with the Zero-Shot-CoT technique, which prompts the model to "think step by step", we further demonstrate that role-play prompting can generate a more effective CoT. This highlights its potential to augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

Tell Me What You Don't Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing

Role-Playing Agents (RPAs) have shown remarkable performance in various applications, yet they often struggle to recognize and appropriately respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. To investigate RPAs' performance when faced with different types of conflicting requests, we develop an evaluation benchmark that includes contextual knowledge conflicting requests, parametric knowledge conflicting requests, and non-conflicting requests to assess RPAs' ability to identify conflicts and refuse to answer appropriately without over-refusing. Through extensive evaluation, we find that most RPAs behave significant performance gaps toward different conflict requests. To elucidate the reasons, we conduct an in-depth representation-level analysis of RPAs under various conflict scenarios. Our findings reveal the existence of rejection regions and direct response regions within the model's forwarding representation, and thus influence the RPA's final response behavior. Therefore, we introduce a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model's refusal accuracy. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our editing method, improving RPAs' refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities.

Persona is a Double-edged Sword: Enhancing the Zero-shot Reasoning by Ensembling the Role-playing and Neutral Prompts

Recent studies demonstrate that prompting an appropriate role-playing persona to an LLM improves its reasoning capability. However, assigning a proper persona is difficult since an LLM's performance is extremely sensitive to assigned prompts; therefore, personas sometimes hinder LLMs and degrade their reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Jekyll \& Hyde, which ensembles the results of role-playing and neutral prompts to eradicate performance degradation via unilateral use of role-playing prompted LLM and enhance the robustness of an LLM's reasoning ability. Specifically, Jekyll \& Hyde collects two potential solutions from both role-playing and neutral prompts and selects a better solution after cross-checking via an LLM evaluator. However, LLM-based evaluators tend to be affected by the order of those potential solutions within the prompt when selecting the proper solution; thus, we also propose a robust LLM evaluator to mitigate the position bias. The experimental analysis demonstrates that role-playing prompts distract LLMs and degrade their reasoning abilities in 4 out of 12 datasets, even when using GPT-4. In addition, we reveal that Jekyll \& Hyde improves reasoning capabilities by selecting better choices among the potential solutions on twelve widely-used reasoning datasets. We further show that our proposed LLM evaluator outperforms other baselines, proving the LLMs' position bias is successfully mitigated.

Bringing Characters to New Stories: Training-Free Theme-Specific Image Generation via Dynamic Visual Prompting

The stories and characters that captivate us as we grow up shape unique fantasy worlds, with images serving as the primary medium for visually experiencing these realms. Personalizing generative models through fine-tuning with theme-specific data has become a prevalent approach in text-to-image generation. However, unlike object customization, which focuses on learning specific objects, theme-specific generation encompasses diverse elements such as characters, scenes, and objects. Such diversity also introduces a key challenge: how to adaptively generate multi-character, multi-concept, and continuous theme-specific images (TSI). Moreover, fine-tuning approaches often come with significant computational overhead, time costs, and risks of overfitting. This paper explores a fundamental question: Can image generation models directly leverage images as contextual input, similarly to how large language models use text as context? To address this, we present T-Prompter, a novel training-free TSI method for generation. T-Prompter introduces visual prompting, a mechanism that integrates reference images into generative models, allowing users to seamlessly specify the target theme without requiring additional training. To further enhance this process, we propose a Dynamic Visual Prompting (DVP) mechanism, which iteratively optimizes visual prompts to improve the accuracy and quality of generated images. Our approach enables diverse applications, including consistent story generation, character design, realistic character generation, and style-guided image generation. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art personalization methods demonstrate that T-Prompter achieves significantly better results and excels in maintaining character identity preserving, style consistency and text alignment, offering a robust and flexible solution for theme-specific image generation.

STARLING: Self-supervised Training of Text-based Reinforcement Learning Agent with Large Language Models

Interactive fiction games have emerged as an important application to improve the generalization capabilities of language-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Existing environments for interactive fiction games are domain-specific or time-consuming to generate and do not train the RL agents to master a specific set of skills. In this work, we introduce an interactive environment for self-supervised RL, STARLING, for text-based games that bootstraps the text-based RL agents with automatically generated games (based on the seed set of game ideas) to boost the performance and generalization capabilities to reach a goal of the target environment. These games let the agent hone their skills on a predefined set of tasks. We create and test an environment with 100 games, generated using this automated framework that uses large language models (GPT-3) and an interactive fiction game engine (based on Inform7) to provide the user with the ability to generate more games under minimal human supervision. Experimental results based on both the human participants and baseline text-based RL agents reveal that current state-of-the-art text-based RL agents cannot use previously learned skills in new situations at the level humans can. These results enforce STARLING's potential to serve as a sandbox environment for further research in self-supervised text-based RL.

Quantifying and Optimizing Global Faithfulness in Persona-driven Role-playing

Persona-driven role-playing (PRP) aims to build AI characters that can respond to user queries by faithfully sticking with all persona statements. Unfortunately, existing faithfulness criteria for PRP are limited to coarse-grained LLM-based scoring without a clear definition or formulation. This paper presents a pioneering exploration to quantify PRP faithfulness as a fine-grained and explainable criterion, which also serves as a reliable reference for optimization. Our criterion first discriminates persona statements into active and passive constraints by identifying the query-statement relevance. Then, we incorporate all constraints following the principle that the AI character's response should be (a) entailed by active (relevant) constraints and (b) not contradicted by passive (irrelevant) constraints. We translate this principle mathematically into a novel Active-Passive-Constraint (APC) score, a constraint-wise sum of natural language inference (NLI) scores weighted by relevance scores. In practice, we build the APC scoring system by symbolically distilling small discriminators from GPT-4 for efficiency. We validate the quality of the APC score against human evaluation based on example personas with tens of statements, and the results show a high correlation. We further leverage it as a reward system in direct preference optimization (DPO) for better AI characters. Our experiments offer a fine-grained and explainable comparison between existing PRP techniques, revealing their advantages and limitations. We further find APC-based DPO to be one of the most competitive techniques for sticking with all constraints and can be well incorporated with other techniques. We then extend the scale of the experiments to real persons with hundreds of statements and reach a consistent conclusion.

Break-for-Make: Modular Low-Rank Adaptations for Composable Content-Style Customization

Personalized generation paradigms empower designers to customize visual intellectual properties with the help of textual descriptions by tuning or adapting pre-trained text-to-image models on a few images. Recent works explore approaches for concurrently customizing both content and detailed visual style appearance. However, these existing approaches often generate images where the content and style are entangled. In this study, we reconsider the customization of content and style concepts from the perspective of parameter space construction. Unlike existing methods that utilize a shared parameter space for content and style, we propose a learning framework that separates the parameter space to facilitate individual learning of content and style, thereby enabling disentangled content and style. To achieve this goal, we introduce "partly learnable projection" (PLP) matrices to separate the original adapters into divided sub-parameter spaces. We propose "break-for-make" customization learning pipeline based on PLP, which is simple yet effective. We break the original adapters into "up projection" and "down projection", train content and style PLPs individually with the guidance of corresponding textual prompts in the separate adapters, and maintain generalization by employing a multi-correspondence projection learning strategy. Based on the adapters broken apart for separate training content and style, we then make the entity parameter space by reconstructing the content and style PLPs matrices, followed by fine-tuning the combined adapter to generate the target object with the desired appearance. Experiments on various styles, including textures, materials, and artistic style, show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art single/multiple concept learning pipelines in terms of content-style-prompt alignment.

PuzzleAvatar: Assembling 3D Avatars from Personal Albums

Generating personalized 3D avatars is crucial for AR/VR. However, recent text-to-3D methods that generate avatars for celebrities or fictional characters, struggle with everyday people. Methods for faithful reconstruction typically require full-body images in controlled settings. What if a user could just upload their personal "OOTD" (Outfit Of The Day) photo collection and get a faithful avatar in return? The challenge is that such casual photo collections contain diverse poses, challenging viewpoints, cropped views, and occlusion (albeit with a consistent outfit, accessories and hairstyle). We address this novel "Album2Human" task by developing PuzzleAvatar, a novel model that generates a faithful 3D avatar (in a canonical pose) from a personal OOTD album, while bypassing the challenging estimation of body and camera pose. To this end, we fine-tune a foundational vision-language model (VLM) on such photos, encoding the appearance, identity, garments, hairstyles, and accessories of a person into (separate) learned tokens and instilling these cues into the VLM. In effect, we exploit the learned tokens as "puzzle pieces" from which we assemble a faithful, personalized 3D avatar. Importantly, we can customize avatars by simply inter-changing tokens. As a benchmark for this new task, we collect a new dataset, called PuzzleIOI, with 41 subjects in a total of nearly 1K OOTD configurations, in challenging partial photos with paired ground-truth 3D bodies. Evaluation shows that PuzzleAvatar not only has high reconstruction accuracy, outperforming TeCH and MVDreamBooth, but also a unique scalability to album photos, and strong robustness. Our model and data will be public.

GUARD: Role-playing to Generate Natural-language Jailbreakings to Test Guideline Adherence of Large Language Models

The discovery of "jailbreaks" to bypass safety filters of Large Language Models (LLMs) and harmful responses have encouraged the community to implement safety measures. One major safety measure is to proactively test the LLMs with jailbreaks prior to the release. Therefore, such testing will require a method that can generate jailbreaks massively and efficiently. In this paper, we follow a novel yet intuitive strategy to generate jailbreaks in the style of the human generation. We propose a role-playing system that assigns four different roles to the user LLMs to collaborate on new jailbreaks. Furthermore, we collect existing jailbreaks and split them into different independent characteristics using clustering frequency and semantic patterns sentence by sentence. We organize these characteristics into a knowledge graph, making them more accessible and easier to retrieve. Our system of different roles will leverage this knowledge graph to generate new jailbreaks, which have proved effective in inducing LLMs to generate unethical or guideline-violating responses. In addition, we also pioneer a setting in our system that will automatically follow the government-issued guidelines to generate jailbreaks to test whether LLMs follow the guidelines accordingly. We refer to our system as GUARD (Guideline Upholding through Adaptive Role-play Diagnostics). We have empirically validated the effectiveness of GUARD on three cutting-edge open-sourced LLMs (Vicuna-13B, LongChat-7B, and Llama-2-7B), as well as a widely-utilized commercial LLM (ChatGPT). Moreover, our work extends to the realm of vision language models (MiniGPT-v2 and Gemini Vision Pro), showcasing GUARD's versatility and contributing valuable insights for the development of safer, more reliable LLM-based applications across diverse modalities.

Emotional RAG: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Emotional Retrieval

As LLMs exhibit a high degree of human-like capability, increasing attention has been paid to role-playing research areas in which responses generated by LLMs are expected to mimic human replies. This has promoted the exploration of role-playing agents in various applications, such as chatbots that can engage in natural conversations with users and virtual assistants that can provide personalized support and guidance. The crucial factor in the role-playing task is the effective utilization of character memory, which stores characters' profiles, experiences, and historical dialogues. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology is used to access the related memory to enhance the response generation of role-playing agents. Most existing studies retrieve related information based on the semantic similarity of memory to maintain characters' personalized traits, and few attempts have been made to incorporate the emotional factor in the retrieval argument generation (RAG) of LLMs. Inspired by the Mood-Dependent Memory theory, which indicates that people recall an event better if they somehow reinstate during recall the original emotion they experienced during learning, we propose a novel emotion-aware memory retrieval framework, termed Emotional RAG, which recalls the related memory with consideration of emotional state in role-playing agents. Specifically, we design two kinds of retrieval strategies, i.e., combination strategy and sequential strategy, to incorporate both memory semantic and emotional states during the retrieval process. Extensive experiments on three representative role-playing datasets demonstrate that our Emotional RAG framework outperforms the method without considering the emotional factor in maintaining the personalities of role-playing agents. This provides evidence to further reinforce the Mood-Dependent Memory theory in psychology.

ChatGPT4PCG 2 Competition: Prompt Engineering for Science Birds Level Generation

This paper presents the second ChatGPT4PCG competition at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Games. In this edition of the competition, we follow the first edition, but make several improvements and changes. We introduce a new evaluation metric along with allowing a more flexible format for participants' submissions and making several improvements to the evaluation pipeline. Continuing from the first edition, we aim to foster and explore the realm of prompt engineering (PE) for procedural content generation (PCG). While the first competition saw success, it was hindered by various limitations; we aim to mitigate these limitations in this edition. We introduce diversity as a new metric to discourage submissions aimed at producing repetitive structures. Furthermore, we allow submission of a Python program instead of a prompt text file for greater flexibility in implementing advanced PE approaches, which may require control flow, including conditions and iterations. We also make several improvements to the evaluation pipeline with a better classifier for similarity evaluation and better-performing function signatures. We thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of the new metric and the improved classifier. Additionally, we perform an ablation study to select a function signature to instruct ChatGPT for level generation. Finally, we provide implementation examples of various PE techniques in Python and evaluate their preliminary performance. We hope this competition serves as a resource and platform for learning about PE and PCG in general.

MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity of performing complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate these agents into completing sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration. However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community has insufficient benchmarks towards building general multi-agents collaboration infrastructure that encompass both LLM and human-NPCs collaborations. In this work, we propose a novel infrastructure - MindAgent - to evaluate planning and coordination emergent capabilities for gaming interaction. In particular, our infrastructure leverages existing gaming framework, to i) require understanding of the coordinator for a multi-agent system, ii) collaborate with human players via un-finetuned proper instructions, and iii) establish an in-context learning on few-shot prompt with feedback. Furthermore, we introduce CUISINEWORLD, a new gaming scenario and related benchmark that dispatch a multi-agent collaboration efficiency and supervise multiple agents playing the game simultaneously. We conduct comprehensive evaluations with new auto-metric CoS for calculating the collaboration efficiency. Finally, our infrastructure can be deployed into real-world gaming scenarios in a customized VR version of CUISINEWORLD and adapted in existing broader Minecraft gaming domain. We hope our findings on LLMs and the new infrastructure for general-purpose scheduling and coordination can help shed light on how such skills can be obtained by learning from large language corpora.

MIRACLE: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control

Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. Previous approaches have explored explicitly user profile modeling using text descriptions, implicit derivation of user embeddings, or utilizing handicraft prompts for ChatGPT-like models. However, textual personas are limited in describing multi-faceted attributes (e.g., language style, inner character nuances), implicit embedding suffers from personality sparsity, and handicraft prompts lack fine-grained and stable controllability. Hence, these approaches may struggle with complex personalized dialogue generation tasks that require generating controllable responses with multiple personal attributes. To this end, we propose \textsc{Miracle}, a novel personalized dialogue generation method through MultIple PeRsonal Attributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. ttributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. Specifically, our approach first disentangles complex personality into multi-faceted attributes. Subsequently, we employ a conditional variational auto-encoder to align with the dense personalized responses within a latent joint attribute space. We have also tailored a dedicated energy function and customized the ordinary differential equations sampling method to offer flexible attribute composition and precise attribute control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Miracle outperforms several strong baselines in terms of personality controllability and response generation quality. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LZY-the-boys/MIRACLE

CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Support

In our modern, fast-paced, and interconnected world, the importance of mental well-being has grown into a matter of great urgency. However, traditional methods such as Emotional Support Conversations (ESC) face challenges in effectively addressing a diverse range of individual personalities. In response, we introduce the Social Support Conversation (S2Conv) framework. It comprises a series of support agents and the interpersonal matching mechanism, linking individuals with persona-compatible virtual supporters. Utilizing persona decomposition based on the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), we have created the MBTI-1024 Bank, a group that of virtual characters with distinct profiles. Through improved role-playing prompts with behavior preset and dynamic memory, we facilitate the development of the MBTI-S2Conv dataset, which contains conversations between the characters in the MBTI-1024 Bank. Building upon these foundations, we present CharacterChat, a comprehensive S2Conv system, which includes a conversational model driven by personas and memories, along with an interpersonal matching plugin model that dispatches the optimal supporters from the MBTI-1024 Bank for individuals with specific personas. Empirical results indicate the remarkable efficacy of CharacterChat in providing personalized social support and highlight the substantial advantages derived from interpersonal matching. The source code is available in https://github.com/morecry/CharacterChat.

Physics-based Motion Retargeting from Sparse Inputs

Avatars are important to create interactive and immersive experiences in virtual worlds. One challenge in animating these characters to mimic a user's motion is that commercial AR/VR products consist only of a headset and controllers, providing very limited sensor data of the user's pose. Another challenge is that an avatar might have a different skeleton structure than a human and the mapping between them is unclear. In this work we address both of these challenges. We introduce a method to retarget motions in real-time from sparse human sensor data to characters of various morphologies. Our method uses reinforcement learning to train a policy to control characters in a physics simulator. We only require human motion capture data for training, without relying on artist-generated animations for each avatar. This allows us to use large motion capture datasets to train general policies that can track unseen users from real and sparse data in real-time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three characters with different skeleton structure: a dinosaur, a mouse-like creature and a human. We show that the avatar poses often match the user surprisingly well, despite having no sensor information of the lower body available. We discuss and ablate the important components in our framework, specifically the kinematic retargeting step, the imitation, contact and action reward as well as our asymmetric actor-critic observations. We further explore the robustness of our method in a variety of settings including unbalancing, dancing and sports motions.

Sycophancy to Subterfuge: Investigating Reward-Tampering in Large Language Models

In reinforcement learning, specification gaming occurs when AI systems learn undesired behaviors that are highly rewarded due to misspecified training goals. Specification gaming can range from simple behaviors like sycophancy to sophisticated and pernicious behaviors like reward-tampering, where a model directly modifies its own reward mechanism. However, these more pernicious behaviors may be too complex to be discovered via exploration. In this paper, we study whether Large Language Model (LLM) assistants which find easily discovered forms of specification gaming will generalize to perform rarer and more blatant forms, up to and including reward-tampering. We construct a curriculum of increasingly sophisticated gameable environments and find that training on early-curriculum environments leads to more specification gaming on remaining environments. Strikingly, a small but non-negligible proportion of the time, LLM assistants trained on the full curriculum generalize zero-shot to directly rewriting their own reward function. Retraining an LLM not to game early-curriculum environments mitigates, but does not eliminate, reward-tampering in later environments. Moreover, adding harmlessness training to our gameable environments does not prevent reward-tampering. These results demonstrate that LLMs can generalize from common forms of specification gaming to more pernicious reward tampering and that such behavior may be nontrivial to remove.

Deep Policy Networks for NPC Behaviors that Adapt to Changing Design Parameters in Roguelike Games

Recent advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have largely focused on improving the performance of agents with the aim of replacing humans in known and well-defined environments. The use of these techniques as a game design tool for video game production, where the aim is instead to create Non-Player Character (NPC) behaviors, has received relatively little attention until recently. Turn-based strategy games like Roguelikes, for example, present unique challenges to DRL. In particular, the categorical nature of their complex game state, composed of many entities with different attributes, requires agents able to learn how to compare and prioritize these entities. Moreover, this complexity often leads to agents that overfit to states seen during training and that are unable to generalize in the face of design changes made during development. In this paper we propose two network architectures which, when combined with a procedural loot generation system, are able to better handle complex categorical state spaces and to mitigate the need for retraining forced by design decisions. The first is based on a dense embedding of the categorical input space that abstracts the discrete observation model and renders trained agents more able to generalize. The second proposed architecture is more general and is based on a Transformer network able to reason relationally about input and input attributes. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that new agents have better adaptation capacity with respect to a baseline architecture, making this framework more robust to dynamic gameplay changes during development. Based on the results shown in this paper, we believe that these solutions represent a step forward towards making DRL more accessible to the gaming industry.

3D-GPT: Procedural 3D Modeling with Large Language Models

In the pursuit of efficient automated content creation, procedural generation, leveraging modifiable parameters and rule-based systems, emerges as a promising approach. Nonetheless, it could be a demanding endeavor, given its intricate nature necessitating a deep understanding of rules, algorithms, and parameters. To reduce workload, we introduce 3D-GPT, a framework utilizing large language models~(LLMs) for instruction-driven 3D modeling. 3D-GPT positions LLMs as proficient problem solvers, dissecting the procedural 3D modeling tasks into accessible segments and appointing the apt agent for each task. 3D-GPT integrates three core agents: the task dispatch agent, the conceptualization agent, and the modeling agent. They collaboratively achieve two objectives. First, it enhances concise initial scene descriptions, evolving them into detailed forms while dynamically adapting the text based on subsequent instructions. Second, it integrates procedural generation, extracting parameter values from enriched text to effortlessly interface with 3D software for asset creation. Our empirical investigations confirm that 3D-GPT not only interprets and executes instructions, delivering reliable results but also collaborates effectively with human designers. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with Blender, unlocking expanded manipulation possibilities. Our work highlights the potential of LLMs in 3D modeling, offering a basic framework for future advancements in scene generation and animation.

Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profiles

User simulators are crucial for replicating human interactions with dialogue systems, supporting both collaborative training and automatic evaluation, especially for large language models (LLMs). However, existing simulators often rely solely on text utterances, missing implicit user traits such as personality, speaking style, and goals. In contrast, persona-based methods lack generalizability, as they depend on predefined profiles of famous individuals or archetypes. To address these challenges, we propose User Simulator with implicit Profiles (USP), a framework that infers implicit user profiles from human-machine conversations and uses them to generate more personalized and realistic dialogues. We first develop an LLM-driven extractor with a comprehensive profile schema. Then, we refine the simulation through conditional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency, optimizing it at both the utterance and conversation levels. Finally, we adopt a diverse profile sampler to capture the distribution of real-world user profiles. Experimental results demonstrate that USP outperforms strong baselines in terms of authenticity and diversity while achieving comparable performance in consistency. Furthermore, dynamic multi-turn evaluations based on USP strongly align with mainstream benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents--computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture--observation, planning, and reflection--each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.

DraftRec: Personalized Draft Recommendation for Winning in Multi-Player Online Battle Arena Games

This paper presents a personalized character recommendation system for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games which are considered as one of the most popular online video game genres around the world. When playing MOBA games, players go through a draft stage, where they alternately select a virtual character to play. When drafting, players select characters by not only considering their character preferences, but also the synergy and competence of their team's character combination. However, the complexity of drafting induces difficulties for beginners to choose the appropriate characters based on the characters of their team while considering their own champion preferences. To alleviate this problem, we propose DraftRec, a novel hierarchical model which recommends characters by considering each player's champion preferences and the interaction between the players. DraftRec consists of two networks: the player network and the match network. The player network captures the individual player's champion preference, and the match network integrates the complex relationship between the players and their respective champions. We train and evaluate our model from a manually collected 280,000 matches of League of Legends and a publicly available 50,000 matches of Dota2. Empirically, our method achieved state-of-the-art performance in character recommendation and match outcome prediction task. Furthermore, a comprehensive user survey confirms that DraftRec provides convincing and satisfying recommendations. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/dojeon-ai/DraftRec.

LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs

Personalization plays a critical role in numerous language tasks and applications, since users with the same requirements may prefer diverse outputs based on their individual interests. This has led to the development of various personalized approaches aimed at adapting large language models (LLMs) to generate customized outputs aligned with user preferences. Some of them involve fine-tuning a unique personalized LLM for each user, which is too expensive for widespread application. Alternative approaches introduce personalization information in a plug-and-play manner by retrieving the user's relevant historical texts as demonstrations. However, this retrieval-based strategy may break the continuity of the user history and fail to capture the user's overall styles and patterns, hence leading to sub-optimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel personalized LLM model, . It constructs a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling all her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module. By attaching this embedding to the task input, LLMs can better understand and capture user habits and preferences, thereby producing more personalized outputs without tuning their own parameters. Extensive experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches.

Programmable Motion Generation for Open-Set Motion Control Tasks

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.

FSPO: Few-Shot Preference Optimization of Synthetic Preference Data in LLMs Elicits Effective Personalization to Real Users

Effective personalization of LLMs is critical for a broad range of user-interfacing applications such as virtual assistants and content curation. Inspired by the strong in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, we propose Few-Shot Preference Optimization (FSPO), which reframes reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Under this framework, an LLM learns to quickly adapt to a user via a few labeled preferences from that user, constructing a personalized reward function for them. Additionally, since real-world preference data is scarce and challenging to collect at scale, we propose careful design choices to construct synthetic preference datasets for personalization, generating over 1M synthetic personalized preferences using publicly available LLMs. In particular, to successfully transfer from synthetic data to real users, we find it crucial for the data to exhibit both high diversity and coherent, self-consistent structure. We evaluate FSPO on personalized open-ended generation for up to 1,500 synthetic users across across three domains: movie reviews, pedagogical adaptation based on educational background, and general question answering, along with a controlled human study. Overall, FSPO achieves an 87% Alpaca Eval winrate on average in generating responses that are personalized to synthetic users and a 72% winrate with real human users in open-ended question answering.

USER-VLM 360: Personalized Vision Language Models with User-aware Tuning for Social Human-Robot Interactions

The integration of vision-language models into robotic systems constitutes a significant advancement in enabling machines to interact with their surroundings in a more intuitive manner. While VLMs offer rich multimodal reasoning, existing approaches lack user-specific adaptability, often relying on generic interaction paradigms that fail to account for individual behavioral, contextual, or socio-emotional nuances. When customization is attempted, ethical concerns arise from unmitigated biases in user data, risking exclusion or unfair treatment. To address these dual challenges, we propose User-VLM 360{\deg}, a holistic framework integrating multimodal user modeling with bias-aware optimization. Our approach features: (1) user-aware tuning that adapts interactions in real time using visual-linguistic signals; (2) bias mitigation via preference optimization; and (3) curated 360{\deg} socio-emotive interaction datasets annotated with demographic, emotion, and relational metadata. Evaluations across eight benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art results: +35.3% F1 in personalized VQA, +47.5% F1 in facial features understanding, 15% bias reduction, and 30X speedup over baselines. Ablation studies confirm component efficacy, and deployment on the Pepper robot validates real-time adaptability across diverse users. We open-source parameter-efficient 3B/10B models and an ethical verification framework for responsible adaptation.

AvatarBooth: High-Quality and Customizable 3D Human Avatar Generation

We introduce AvatarBooth, a novel method for generating high-quality 3D avatars using text prompts or specific images. Unlike previous approaches that can only synthesize avatars based on simple text descriptions, our method enables the creation of personalized avatars from casually captured face or body images, while still supporting text-based model generation and editing. Our key contribution is the precise avatar generation control by using dual fine-tuned diffusion models separately for the human face and body. This enables us to capture intricate details of facial appearance, clothing, and accessories, resulting in highly realistic avatar generations. Furthermore, we introduce pose-consistent constraint to the optimization process to enhance the multi-view consistency of synthesized head images from the diffusion model and thus eliminate interference from uncontrolled human poses. In addition, we present a multi-resolution rendering strategy that facilitates coarse-to-fine supervision of 3D avatar generation, thereby enhancing the performance of the proposed system. The resulting avatar model can be further edited using additional text descriptions and driven by motion sequences. Experiments show that AvatarBooth outperforms previous text-to-3D methods in terms of rendering and geometric quality from either text prompts or specific images. Please check our project website at https://zeng-yifei.github.io/avatarbooth_page/.

MaskedMimic: Unified Physics-Based Character Control Through Masked Motion Inpainting

Crafting a single, versatile physics-based controller that can breathe life into interactive characters across a wide spectrum of scenarios represents an exciting frontier in character animation. An ideal controller should support diverse control modalities, such as sparse target keyframes, text instructions, and scene information. While previous works have proposed physically simulated, scene-aware control models, these systems have predominantly focused on developing controllers that each specializes in a narrow set of tasks and control modalities. This work presents MaskedMimic, a novel approach that formulates physics-based character control as a general motion inpainting problem. Our key insight is to train a single unified model to synthesize motions from partial (masked) motion descriptions, such as masked keyframes, objects, text descriptions, or any combination thereof. This is achieved by leveraging motion tracking data and designing a scalable training method that can effectively utilize diverse motion descriptions to produce coherent animations. Through this process, our approach learns a physics-based controller that provides an intuitive control interface without requiring tedious reward engineering for all behaviors of interest. The resulting controller supports a wide range of control modalities and enables seamless transitions between disparate tasks. By unifying character control through motion inpainting, MaskedMimic creates versatile virtual characters. These characters can dynamically adapt to complex scenes and compose diverse motions on demand, enabling more interactive and immersive experiences.

GameFactory: Creating New Games with Generative Interactive Videos

Generative game engines have the potential to revolutionize game development by autonomously creating new content and reducing manual workload. However, existing video-based game generation methods fail to address the critical challenge of scene generalization, limiting their applicability to existing games with fixed styles and scenes. In this paper, we present GameFactory, a framework focused on exploring scene generalization in game video generation. To enable the creation of entirely new and diverse games, we leverage pre-trained video diffusion models trained on open-domain video data. To bridge the domain gap between open-domain priors and small-scale game dataset, we propose a multi-phase training strategy that decouples game style learning from action control, preserving open-domain generalization while achieving action controllability. Using Minecraft as our data source, we release GF-Minecraft, a high-quality and diversity action-annotated video dataset for research. Furthermore, we extend our framework to enable autoregressive action-controllable game video generation, allowing the production of unlimited-length interactive game videos. Experimental results demonstrate that GameFactory effectively generates open-domain, diverse, and action-controllable game videos, representing a significant step forward in AI-driven game generation. Our dataset and project page are publicly available at https://vvictoryuki.github.io/gamefactory/.

Learning Latent Plans from Play

Acquiring a diverse repertoire of general-purpose skills remains an open challenge for robotics. In this work, we propose self-supervising control on top of human teleoperated play data as a way to scale up skill learning. Play has two properties that make it attractive compared to conventional task demonstrations. Play is cheap, as it can be collected in large quantities quickly without task segmenting, labeling, or resetting to an initial state. Play is naturally rich, covering ~4x more interaction space than task demonstrations for the same amount of collection time. To learn control from play, we introduce Play-LMP, a self-supervised method that learns to organize play behaviors in a latent space, then reuse them at test time to achieve specific goals. Combining self-supervised control with a diverse play dataset shifts the focus of skill learning from a narrow and discrete set of tasks to the full continuum of behaviors available in an environment. We find that this combination generalizes well empirically---after self-supervising on unlabeled play, our method substantially outperforms individual expert-trained policies on 18 difficult user-specified visual manipulation tasks in a simulated robotic tabletop environment. We additionally find that play-supervised models, unlike their expert-trained counterparts, are more robust to perturbations and exhibit retrying-till-success behaviors. Finally, we find that our agent organizes its latent plan space around functional tasks, despite never being trained with task labels. Videos, code and data are available at learning-from-play.github.io

TADA! Text to Animatable Digital Avatars

We introduce TADA, a simple-yet-effective approach that takes textual descriptions and produces expressive 3D avatars with high-quality geometry and lifelike textures, that can be animated and rendered with traditional graphics pipelines. Existing text-based character generation methods are limited in terms of geometry and texture quality, and cannot be realistically animated due to inconsistent alignment between the geometry and the texture, particularly in the face region. To overcome these limitations, TADA leverages the synergy of a 2D diffusion model and an animatable parametric body model. Specifically, we derive an optimizable high-resolution body model from SMPL-X with 3D displacements and a texture map, and use hierarchical rendering with score distillation sampling (SDS) to create high-quality, detailed, holistic 3D avatars from text. To ensure alignment between the geometry and texture, we render normals and RGB images of the generated character and exploit their latent embeddings in the SDS training process. We further introduce various expression parameters to deform the generated character during training, ensuring that the semantics of our generated character remain consistent with the original SMPL-X model, resulting in an animatable character. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that TADA significantly surpasses existing approaches on both qualitative and quantitative measures. TADA enables creation of large-scale digital character assets that are ready for animation and rendering, while also being easily editable through natural language. The code will be public for research purposes.

Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactions

Virtual counselors powered by large language models (LLMs) aim to create interactive support systems that effectively assist clients struggling with mental health challenges. To replicate counselor-client conversations, researchers have built an online mental health platform that allows professional counselors to provide clients with text-based counseling services for about an hour per session. Notwithstanding its effectiveness, challenges exist as human annotation is time-consuming, cost-intensive, privacy-protected, and not scalable. To address this issue and investigate the applicability of LLMs in psychological counseling conversation simulation, we propose a framework that employs two LLMs via role-playing for simulating counselor-client interactions. Our framework involves two LLMs, one acting as a client equipped with a specific and real-life user profile and the other playing the role of an experienced counselor, generating professional responses using integrative therapy techniques. We implement both the counselor and the client by zero-shot prompting the GPT-4 model. In order to assess the effectiveness of LLMs in simulating counselor-client interactions and understand the disparities between LLM- and human-generated conversations, we evaluate the synthetic data from various perspectives. We begin by assessing the client's performance through automatic evaluations. Next, we analyze and compare the disparities between dialogues generated by the LLM and those generated by professional counselors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to thoroughly examine the performance of our LLM-based counselor trained with synthetic interactive dialogues by benchmarking against state-of-the-art models for mental health.

SPRING: GPT-4 Out-performs RL Algorithms by Studying Papers and Reasoning

Open-world survival games pose significant challenges for AI algorithms due to their multi-tasking, deep exploration, and goal prioritization requirements. Despite reinforcement learning (RL) being popular for solving games, its high sample complexity limits its effectiveness in complex open-world games like Crafter or Minecraft. We propose a novel approach, SPRING, to read the game's original academic paper and use the knowledge learned to reason and play the game through a large language model (LLM). Prompted with the LaTeX source as game context and a description of the agent's current observation, our SPRING framework employs a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with game-related questions as nodes and dependencies as edges. We identify the optimal action to take in the environment by traversing the DAG and calculating LLM responses for each node in topological order, with the LLM's answer to final node directly translating to environment actions. In our experiments, we study the quality of in-context "reasoning" induced by different forms of prompts under the setting of the Crafter open-world environment. Our experiments suggest that LLMs, when prompted with consistent chain-of-thought, have great potential in completing sophisticated high-level trajectories. Quantitatively, SPRING with GPT-4 outperforms all state-of-the-art RL baselines, trained for 1M steps, without any training. Finally, we show the potential of games as a test bed for LLMs.

LLM Agents for Psychology: A Study on Gamified Assessments

Psychological measurement is essential for mental health, self-understanding, and personal development. Traditional methods, such as self-report scales and psychologist interviews, often face challenges with engagement and accessibility. While game-based and LLM-based tools have been explored to improve user interest and automate assessment, they struggle to balance engagement with generalizability. In this work, we propose PsychoGAT (Psychological Game AgenTs) to achieve a generic gamification of psychological assessment. The main insight is that powerful LLMs can function both as adept psychologists and innovative game designers. By incorporating LLM agents into designated roles and carefully managing their interactions, PsychoGAT can transform any standardized scales into personalized and engaging interactive fiction games. To validate the proposed method, we conduct psychometric evaluations to assess its effectiveness and employ human evaluators to examine the generated content across various psychological constructs, including depression, cognitive distortions, and personality traits. Results demonstrate that PsychoGAT serves as an effective assessment tool, achieving statistically significant excellence in psychometric metrics such as reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Moreover, human evaluations confirm PsychoGAT's enhancements in content coherence, interactivity, interest, immersion, and satisfaction.

ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application, which aims to reduce human stress, offer emotional guidance, and ultimately enhance human mental and physical well-being. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), many researchers have employed LLMs as the ESC models. However, the evaluation of these LLM-based ESCs remains uncertain. Inspired by the awesome development of role-playing agents, we propose an ESC Evaluation framework (ESC-Eval), which uses a role-playing agent to interact with ESC models, followed by a manual evaluation of the interactive dialogues. In detail, we first re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards from seven existing datasets to define the roles of the role-playing agent. Second, we train a specific role-playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4. Third, through ESC-Role and organized role cards, we systematically conduct experiments using 14 LLMs as the ESC models, including general AI-assistant LLMs (ChatGPT) and ESC-oriented LLMs (ExTES-Llama). We conduct comprehensive human annotations on interactive multi-turn dialogues of different ESC models. The results show that ESC-oriented LLMs exhibit superior ESC abilities compared to general AI-assistant LLMs, but there is still a gap behind human performance. Moreover, to automate the scoring process for future ESC models, we developed ESC-RANK, which trained on the annotated data, achieving a scoring performance surpassing 35 points of GPT-4. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/haidequanbu/ESC-Eval.

Fantastic Copyrighted Beasts and How (Not) to Generate Them

Recent studies show that image and video generation models can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted content from their training data, raising serious legal concerns around copyright infringement. Copyrighted characters, in particular, pose a difficult challenge for image generation services, with at least one lawsuit already awarding damages based on the generation of these characters. Yet, little research has empirically examined this issue. We conduct a systematic evaluation to fill this gap. First, we build CopyCat, an evaluation suite consisting of diverse copyrighted characters and a novel evaluation pipeline. Our evaluation considers both the detection of similarity to copyrighted characters and generated image's consistency with user input. Our evaluation systematically shows that both image and video generation models can still generate characters even if characters' names are not explicitly mentioned in the prompt, sometimes with only two generic keywords (e.g., prompting with "videogame, plumber" consistently generates Nintendo's Mario character). We then introduce techniques to semi-automatically identify such keywords or descriptions that trigger character generation. Using our evaluation suite, we study runtime mitigation strategies, including both existing methods and new strategies we propose. Our findings reveal that commonly employed strategies, such as prompt rewriting in the DALL-E system, are not sufficient as standalone guardrails. These strategies must be coupled with other approaches, like negative prompting, to effectively reduce the unintended generation of copyrighted characters. Our work provides empirical grounding to the discussion of copyright mitigation strategies and offers actionable insights for model deployers actively implementing them.

TMGBench: A Systematic Game Benchmark for Evaluating Strategic Reasoning Abilities of LLMs

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated their application in reasoning, with strategic reasoning drawing increasing attention. To evaluate LLMs' strategic reasoning capabilities, game theory, with its concise structure, has become a preferred approach. However, current research focuses on a limited selection of games, resulting in low coverage. Classic game scenarios risk data leakage, and existing benchmarks often lack extensibility, making them inadequate for evaluating state-of-the-art models. To address these challenges, we propose TMGBench, a benchmark with comprehensive game type coverage, novel scenarios, and flexible organization. Specifically, we incorporate all 144 game types summarized by the Robinson-Goforth topology of 2x2 games, constructed as classic games. We also employ synthetic data generation to create diverse, higher-quality scenarios through topic guidance and human inspection, referred to as story-based games. Lastly, we provide a sustainable framework for increasingly powerful LLMs by treating these games as atomic units and organizing them into more complex forms via sequential, parallel, and nested structures. Our comprehensive evaluation of mainstream LLMs covers tests on rational reasoning, robustness, Theory-of-Mind (ToM), and reasoning in complex forms. Results reveal flaws in accuracy, consistency, and varying mastery of ToM. Additionally, o1-mini, OpenAI's latest reasoning model, achieved accuracy rates of 66.6%, 60.0%, and 70.0% on sequential, parallel, and nested games, highlighting TMGBench's challenges.