aiqbench analysis
This research establishes a rigorous benchmark for inferring player traits from gameplay transcripts using Large Language Models, addressing critical issues like verifying inferred profiles and disentangling preference from opportunity constraints. By moving beyond self-reported questionnaires which often introduce circularity or noise, the study demonstrates that few-shot LLMs can effectively adapt game difficulty based on behaviorally derived insights without relying on known decision models. This work advances personalized gaming by providing a policy-agnostic framework to validate how AI interprets complex human behaviors in dynamic environments.
Beyond Asking: A Pipeline for Personalized Game Generation that Reads Players from Behavior
arXiv:2608.16196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized game generation requires inferring a player's abilities and behavioral style from how they play. Large language models have made this inference more attainable than ever: an LLM can read a raw gameplay transcript and produce a fluent, plausible profile of the player. Plausible, however, is not verified, and verification is precisely what the field lacks: latent traits are unobservable; questionnaires provide noisy proxies and become circular when self-reports are used to validate behavior-based inference; and behavior itself is ambiguous without context -- a player who never collects an item may not want it, or may never have had the chance. We address both problems. First, we construct a synthetic player population whose traits are ground truth by construction: each trait is an explicit bot parameter, accepted only after controlled manipulation produces consistent, trait-specific behavioral change. Unlike prior parameter-recovery work that inverts a known decision model, our benchmark evaluates policy-agnostic inference from behavioral transcripts alone. Second, we introduce an opportunity-aware decision-moment representation that disentangles preference from the chance to express it; ablating it selectively degrades opportunity-dependent traits. On this benchmark, few-shot LLM inference outperforms embedding- and rule-based baselines on most traits, though feature-based supervised regressors remain stronger overall. Finally, we close the loop: inferred profiles drive difficulty adaptation, evaluated against ground-truth references and mismatched-profile controls, and an exploratory human study examines whether these findings transfer to real players.
Abstract:Personalized game generation requires inferring a player's abilities and behavioral style from how they play. Large language models have made this inference more attainable than ever: an LLM can read a raw gameplay transcript and produce a fluent, plausible profile of the player. Plausible, however, is not verified, and verification is precisely what the field lacks: latent traits are unobservable; questionnaires provide noisy proxies and become circular when self-reports are used to validate behavior-based inference; and behavior itself is ambiguous without context -- a player who never collects an item may not want it, or may never have had the chance. We address both problems. First, we construct a synthetic player population whose traits are ground truth by construction: each trait is an explicit bot parameter, accepted only after controlled manipulation produces consistent, trait-specific behavioral change. Unlike prior parameter-recovery work that inverts a known decision model, our benchmark evaluates policy-agnostic inference from behavioral transcripts alone. Second, we introduce an opportunity-aware decision-moment representation that disentangles preference from the chance to express it; ablating it selectively degrades opportunity-dependent traits. On this benchmark, few-shot LLM inference outperforms embedding- and rule-based baselines on most traits, though feature-based supervised regressors remain stronger overall. Finally, we close the loop: inferred profiles drive difficulty adaptation, evaluated against ground-truth references and mismatched-profile controls, and an exploratory human study examines whether these findings transfer to real players.
16 pages, 3 figures, 6 tables. Includes technical appendix
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
I.2.1; I.2.6; H.5.2
arXiv:2608.16196 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.16196v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.16196 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 337 words
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