Character is Destiny: Can Large Language Models Simulate Persona-Driven Decisions in Role-Playing?

Abstract

Can Large Language Models (LLMs) substitute humans in making important decisions? Recent research has unveiled the potential of LLMs to role-play assigned personas, mimicking their knowledge and linguistic habits. However, imitative decision-making necessitates a more nuanced understanding of personas. In this paper, we benchmark the ability of LLMs in persona-driven decision-making. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can predict characters’ decisions provided with the preceding stories in high-quality novels. Leveraging character analyses written by literary experts, we construct a dataset LIFECHOICE comprising 1,401 character decision points from 395 books. Then, we conduct comprehensive experiments on LIFECHOICE, with various LLMs and methods for LLM role-playing. The results demonstrate that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit promising capabilities in this task, yet substantial room for improvement remains. Hence, we further propose the CHARMAP method, which achieves a 6.01% increase in accuracy via persona-based memory retrieval. We will make our datasets and code publicly available.