Open Models, Closed Minds? On Agents Capabilities in Mimicking Human Personalities through Open Large Language Models

The emergence of unveiling human-like behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a closer connection between NLP and human psychology. Scholars have been studying the inherent personalities exhibited by LLMs and attempting to incorporate human traits and behaviors into them. However, these efforts have primarily focused on commercially-licensed LLMs, neglecting the widespread use and notable advancements seen in Open LLMs. This work aims to address this gap by employing a set of 12 LLM Agents based on the most representative Open models and subject them to a series of assessments concerning the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test and the Big Five Inventory (BFI) test. Our approach involves evaluating the intrinsic personality traits of Open LLM agents and determining the extent to which these agents can mimic human personalities when conditioned by specific personalities and roles. Our findings unveil that $(i)$ each Open LLM agent showcases distinct human personalities; $(ii)$ personality-conditioned prompting produces varying effects on the agents, with only few successfully mirroring the imposed personality, while most of them being ``closed-minded'' (i.e., they retain their intrinsic traits); and $(iii)$ combining role and personality conditioning can enhance the agents' ability to mimic human personalities. Our work represents a step up in understanding the dense relationship between NLP and human psychology through the lens of Open LLMs.

Nex-Gen and Alternative Social Media @ICWSM2025

Open Models, Closed Minds? On Agents Capabilities in Mimicking Human Personalities through Open Large Language Models

The emergence of unveiling human-like behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a closer connection between NLP and human psychology. Scholars have been studying the inherent personalities exhibited by LLMs and attempting to incorporate human traits and behaviors into them. However, these efforts have primarily focused on commercially-licensed LLMs, neglecting the widespread use and notable advancements seen in Open LLMs. This work aims to address this gap by employing a set of 12 LLM Agents based on the most representative Open models and subject them to a series of assessments concerning the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test and the Big Five Inventory (BFI) test. Our approach involves evaluating the intrinsic personality traits of Open LLM agents and determining the extent to which these agents can mimic human personalities when conditioned by specific personalities and roles. Our findings unveil that $(i)$ each Open LLM agent showcases distinct human personalities; $(ii)$ personality-conditioned prompting produces varying effects on the agents, with only few successfully mirroring the imposed personality, while most of them being ``closed-minded'' (i.e., they retain their intrinsic traits); and $(iii)$ combining role and personality conditioning can enhance the agents' ability to mimic human personalities. Our work represents a step up in understanding the dense relationship between NLP and human psychology through the lens of Open LLMs.

Talking the Talk Does Not Entail Walking the Walk: On the Limits of Large Language Models in Lexical Entailment Recognition

Verbs form the backbone of language, providing the structure and meaning to sentences. Yet, their intricate semantic nuances pose a longstanding challenge. Understanding verb relations through the concept of lexical entailment is crucial for comprehending sentence meanings and grasping verb dynamics. This work investigates the capabilities of eight Large Language Models in recognizing lexical entailment relations among verbs through differently devised prompting strategies and zero-/few-shot settings over verb pairs from two lexical databases, namely WordNet and HyperLex. Our findings unveil that the models can tackle the lexical entailment recognition task with moderately good performance, although at varying degree of effectiveness and under different conditions. Also, utilizing few-shot prompting can enhance the models' performance. However, perfectly solving the task arises as an unmet challenge for all examined LLMs, which raises an emergence for further research developments on this topic.

IOS Press Ebooks - Is Contrasting All You Need? Contrastive Learning for the Detection and Attribution of AI-generated Text