new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

by AK and the research community

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.

Can ChatGPT Assess Human Personalities? A General Evaluation Framework

Large Language Models (LLMs) especially ChatGPT have produced impressive results in various areas, but their potential human-like psychology is still largely unexplored. Existing works study the virtual personalities of LLMs but rarely explore the possibility of analyzing human personalities via LLMs. This paper presents a generic evaluation framework for LLMs to assess human personalities based on Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) tests. Specifically, we first devise unbiased prompts by randomly permuting options in MBTI questions and adopt the average testing result to encourage more impartial answer generation. Then, we propose to replace the subject in question statements to enable flexible queries and assessments on different subjects from LLMs. Finally, we re-formulate the question instructions in a manner of correctness evaluation to facilitate LLMs to generate clearer responses. The proposed framework enables LLMs to flexibly assess personalities of different groups of people. We further propose three evaluation metrics to measure the consistency, robustness, and fairness of assessment results from state-of-the-art LLMs including ChatGPT and InstructGPT. Our experiments reveal ChatGPT's ability to assess human personalities, and the average results demonstrate that it can achieve more consistent and fairer assessments in spite of lower robustness against prompt biases compared with InstructGPT.

PsyDI: Towards a Personalized and Progressively In-depth Chatbot for Psychological Measurements

In the field of psychology, traditional assessment methods, such as standardized scales, are frequently critiqued for their static nature, lack of personalization, and reduced participant engagement, while comprehensive counseling evaluations are often inaccessible. The complexity of quantifying psychological traits further limits these methods. Despite advances with large language models (LLMs), many still depend on single-round Question-and-Answer interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce PsyDI, a personalized and progressively in-depth chatbot designed for psychological measurements, exemplified by its application in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework. PsyDI leverages user-related multi-modal information and engages in customized, multi-turn interactions to provide personalized, easily accessible measurements, while ensuring precise MBTI type determination. To address the challenge of unquantifiable psychological traits, we introduce a novel training paradigm that involves learning the ranking of proxy variables associated with these traits, culminating in a robust score model for MBTI measurements. The score model enables PsyDI to conduct comprehensive and precise measurements through multi-turn interactions within a unified estimation context. Through various experiments, we validate the efficacy of both the score model and the PsyDI pipeline, demonstrating its potential to serve as a general framework for psychological measurements. Furthermore, the online deployment of PsyDI has garnered substantial user engagement, with over 3,000 visits, resulting in the collection of numerous multi-turn dialogues annotated with MBTI types, which facilitates further research.

Personality Style Recognition via Machine Learning: Identifying Anaclitic and Introjective Personality Styles from Patients' Speech

In disentangling the heterogeneity observed in psychopathology, personality of the patients is considered crucial. While it has been demonstrated that personality traits are reflected in the language used by a patient, we hypothesize that this enables automatic inference of the personality type directly from speech utterances, potentially more accurately than through a traditional questionnaire-based approach explicitly designed for personality classification. To validate this hypothesis, we adopt natural language processing (NLP) and standard machine learning tools for classification. We test this on a dataset of recorded clinical diagnostic interviews (CDI) on a sample of 79 patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) -- a condition for which differentiated treatment based on personality styles has been advocated -- and classified into anaclitic and introjective personality styles. We start by analyzing the interviews to see which linguistic features are associated with each style, in order to gain a better understanding of the styles. Then, we develop automatic classifiers based on (a) standardized questionnaire responses; (b) basic text features, i.e., TF-IDF scores of words and word sequences; (c) more advanced text features, using LIWC (linguistic inquiry and word count) and context-aware features using BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers); (d) audio features. We find that automated classification with language-derived features (i.e., based on LIWC) significantly outperforms questionnaire-based classification models. Furthermore, the best performance is achieved by combining LIWC with the questionnaire features. This suggests that more work should be put into developing linguistically based automated techniques for characterizing personality, however questionnaires still to some extent complement such methods.

Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics

The idea of personality in descriptive psychology, traditionally defined through observable behavior, has now been extended to Large Language Models (LLMs) to better understand their behavior. This raises a question: do LLMs exhibit distinct and consistent personality traits, similar to humans? Existing self-assessment personality tests, while applicable, lack the necessary validity and reliability for precise personality measurements. To address this, we introduce TRAIT, a new tool consisting of 8K multi-choice questions designed to assess the personality of LLMs with validity and reliability. TRAIT is built on the psychometrically validated human questionnaire, Big Five Inventory (BFI) and Short Dark Triad (SD-3), enhanced with the ATOMIC10X knowledge graph for testing personality in a variety of real scenarios. TRAIT overcomes the reliability and validity issues when measuring personality of LLM with self-assessment, showing the highest scores across three metrics: refusal rate, prompt sensitivity, and option order sensitivity. It reveals notable insights into personality of LLM: 1) LLMs exhibit distinct and consistent personality, which is highly influenced by their training data (i.e., data used for alignment tuning), and 2) current prompting techniques have limited effectiveness in eliciting certain traits, such as high psychopathy or low conscientiousness, suggesting the need for further research in this direction.

Pushing on Personality Detection from Verbal Behavior: A Transformer Meets Text Contours of Psycholinguistic Features

Research at the intersection of personality psychology, computer science, and linguistics has recently focused increasingly on modeling and predicting personality from language use. We report two major improvements in predicting personality traits from text data: (1) to our knowledge, the most comprehensive set of theory-based psycholinguistic features and (2) hybrid models that integrate a pre-trained Transformer Language Model BERT and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) networks trained on within-text distributions ('text contours') of psycholinguistic features. We experiment with BLSTM models (with and without Attention) and with two techniques for applying pre-trained language representations from the transformer model - 'feature-based' and 'fine-tuning'. We evaluate the performance of the models we built on two benchmark datasets that target the two dominant theoretical models of personality: the Big Five Essay dataset and the MBTI Kaggle dataset. Our results are encouraging as our models outperform existing work on the same datasets. More specifically, our models achieve improvement in classification accuracy by 2.9% on the Essay dataset and 8.28% on the Kaggle MBTI dataset. In addition, we perform ablation experiments to quantify the impact of different categories of psycholinguistic features in the respective personality prediction models.

Self-Assessment Tests are Unreliable Measures of LLM Personality

As large language models (LLM) evolve in their capabilities, various recent studies have tried to quantify their behavior using psychological tools created to study human behavior. One such example is the measurement of "personality" of LLMs using self-assessment personality tests developed to measure human personality. Yet almost none of these works verify the applicability of these tests on LLMs. In this paper, we analyze the reliability of LLM personality scores obtained from self-assessment personality tests using two simple experiments. We first introduce the property of prompt sensitivity, where three semantically equivalent prompts representing three intuitive ways of administering self-assessment tests on LLMs are used to measure the personality of the same LLM. We find that all three prompts lead to very different personality scores, a difference that is statistically significant for all traits in a large majority of scenarios. We then introduce the property of option-order symmetry for personality measurement of LLMs. Since most of the self-assessment tests exist in the form of multiple choice question (MCQ) questions, we argue that the scores should also be robust to not just the prompt template but also the order in which the options are presented. This test unsurprisingly reveals that the self-assessment test scores are not robust to the order of the options. These simple tests, done on ChatGPT and three Llama2 models of different sizes, show that self-assessment personality tests created for humans are unreliable measures of personality in LLMs.

PsyCoT: Psychological Questionnaire as Powerful Chain-of-Thought for Personality Detection

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have showcased remarkable zero-shot performance across various NLP tasks. However, the potential of LLMs in personality detection, which involves identifying an individual's personality from their written texts, remains largely unexplored. Drawing inspiration from Psychological Questionnaires, which are carefully designed by psychologists to evaluate individual personality traits through a series of targeted items, we argue that these items can be regarded as a collection of well-structured chain-of-thought (CoT) processes. By incorporating these processes, LLMs can enhance their capabilities to make more reasonable inferences on personality from textual input. In light of this, we propose a novel personality detection method, called PsyCoT, which mimics the way individuals complete psychological questionnaires in a multi-turn dialogue manner. In particular, we employ a LLM as an AI assistant with a specialization in text analysis. We prompt the assistant to rate individual items at each turn and leverage the historical rating results to derive a conclusive personality preference. Our experiments demonstrate that PsyCoT significantly improves the performance and robustness of GPT-3.5 in personality detection, achieving an average F1 score improvement of 4.23/10.63 points on two benchmark datasets compared to the standard prompting method. Our code is available at https://github.com/TaoYang225/PsyCoT.

Towards Personality-Aware Recommendation

In the last decade new ways of shopping online have increased the possibility of buying products and services more easily and faster than ever. In this new context, personality is a key determinant in the decision making of the consumer when shopping. The two main reasons are: firstly, a person's buying choices are influenced by psychological factors like impulsiveness, and secondly, some consumers may be more susceptible to making impulse purchases than others. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of personality factors on advertisements has been largely neglected at the level of recommender systems. This work proposes a highly innovative research which uses a personality perspective to determine the unique associations among the consumer's buying tendency and advert recommendations. As a matter of fact, the lack of a publicly available benchmark for computational advertising do not allow both the exploration of this intriguing research direction and the evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms. We present the ADS Dataset, a publicly available benchmark for computational advertising enriched with Big-Five users' personality factors and 1,200 personal users' pictures. The proposed benchmark allows two main tasks: rating prediction over 300 real advertisements (i.e., Rich Media Ads, Image Ads, Text Ads) and click-through rate prediction. Moreover, this work carries out experiments, reviews various evaluation criteria used in the literature, and provides a library for each one of them within one integrated toolbox.

Eliciting Personality Traits in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilized by both candidates and employers in the recruitment context. However, with this comes numerous ethical concerns, particularly related to the lack of transparency in these "black-box" models. Although previous studies have sought to increase the transparency of these models by investigating the personality traits of LLMs, many of the previous studies have provided them with personality assessments to complete. On the other hand, this study seeks to obtain a better understanding of such models by examining their output variations based on different input prompts. Specifically, we use a novel elicitation approach using prompts derived from common interview questions, as well as prompts designed to elicit particular Big Five personality traits to examine whether the models were susceptible to trait-activation like humans are, to measure their personality based on the language used in their outputs. To do so, we repeatedly prompted multiple LMs with different parameter sizes, including Llama-2, Falcon, Mistral, Bloom, GPT, OPT, and XLNet (base and fine tuned versions) and examined their personality using classifiers trained on the myPersonality dataset. Our results reveal that, generally, all LLMs demonstrate high openness and low extraversion. However, whereas LMs with fewer parameters exhibit similar behaviour in personality traits, newer and LMs with more parameters exhibit a broader range of personality traits, with increased agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness. Furthermore, a greater number of parameters is positively associated with openness and conscientiousness. Moreover, fine-tuned models exhibit minor modulations in their personality traits, contingent on the dataset. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Personality Alignment of Large Language Models

Current methods for aligning large language models (LLMs) typically aim to reflect general human values and behaviors, but they often fail to capture the unique characteristics and preferences of individual users. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of Personality Alignment. This approach tailors LLMs' responses and decisions to match the specific preferences of individual users or closely related groups. Inspired by psychometrics, we created the Personality Alignment with Personality Inventories (PAPI) dataset, which includes data from 300,000 real subjects, each providing behavioral preferences based on the Big Five Personality Factors. This dataset allows us to quantitatively evaluate the extent to which LLMs can align with each subject's behavioral patterns. Recognizing the challenges of personality alignments: such as limited personal data, diverse preferences, and scalability requirements: we developed an activation intervention optimization method. This method enhances LLMs' ability to efficiently align with individual behavioral preferences using minimal data and computational resources. Remarkably, our method, PAS, achieves superior performance while requiring only 1/5 of the optimization time compared to DPO, offering practical value for personality alignment. Our work paves the way for future AI systems to make decisions and reason in truly personality ways, enhancing the relevance and meaning of AI interactions for each user and advancing human-centered artificial intelligence.The code has released in https://github.com/zhu-minjun/PAlign.

Social Biases through the Text-to-Image Generation Lens

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation is enabling new applications that support creators, designers, and general end users of productivity software by generating illustrative content with high photorealism starting from a given descriptive text as a prompt. Such models are however trained on massive amounts of web data, which surfaces the peril of potential harmful biases that may leak in the generation process itself. In this paper, we take a multi-dimensional approach to studying and quantifying common social biases as reflected in the generated images, by focusing on how occupations, personality traits, and everyday situations are depicted across representations of (perceived) gender, age, race, and geographical location. Through an extensive set of both automated and human evaluation experiments we present findings for two popular T2I models: DALLE-v2 and Stable Diffusion. Our results reveal that there exist severe occupational biases of neutral prompts majorly excluding groups of people from results for both models. Such biases can get mitigated by increasing the amount of specification in the prompt itself, although the prompting mitigation will not address discrepancies in image quality or other usages of the model or its representations in other scenarios. Further, we observe personality traits being associated with only a limited set of people at the intersection of race, gender, and age. Finally, an analysis of geographical location representations on everyday situations (e.g., park, food, weddings) shows that for most situations, images generated through default location-neutral prompts are closer and more similar to images generated for locations of United States and Germany.