Persona-Guided LLM Agents for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Abstract:Prior work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can express diverse personality traits in open-ended text generation. However, it remains unclear whether they can do so in a goal-directed dialogue without compromising task completion, and whether adapting to the user's personality improves the interaction quality. We study these questions in task-oriented dialogue (TOD), where a system helps a user accomplish a goal via multi-turn interaction. We build a training-free framework that simulates a TOD interaction between two LLMs: a user agent that exhibits a target personality and a system agent that adapts to the user while completing the task. To isolate the effect of adaptation, we vary how much the system knows about the user's personality across three conditions. In Neutral, the system receives no personality information. In Try, it infers the personality from dialogue cues. In Oracle, it is given the personality explicitly. We evaluate GPT-4o, Qwen3-Next-80B, and Gemini 2.0 Flash on Hotel and Restaurant dialogues from the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, across the Big Five traits and their opposite poles. We find that the user agent can express personality while the system maintains strong task performance, although some traits are realized far less reliably than others. Adapting to the user's personality improves constraint satisfaction, inform rate, and user satisfaction, but lowers truthfulness, revealing a trade-off between personalization and task-grounding. Oracle's gains grow when the target trait is strongly expressed, whereas Try's gains are largely insensitive to realization strength. Overall, cue-based adaptation in Try best resolves this trade-off and offers a more reliable route to personality-aware TOD without fine-tuning.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.18085 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.18085v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.18085 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.