Know Thyself: Validating Knowledge Awareness of LLM-based Persona Agents

Savita Bhat, Ishaan Shukla, Shirish Karande


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in simulating human behaviors, personality, and language. Such synthetic agents with personalities are considered as cost-effective proxies for real users to facilitate crowd-sourcing efforts like annotations, surveys, and A/B testing. Accordingly, it is imperative to validate knowledge awareness of these LLM persona agents when they are customized for further usage. Currently, there is no established way for such evaluation and appropriate mitigation. In this work, we propose a generic evaluation approach to validate LLM based persona agents for correctness, relevance, and diversity in the context of self-awareness and domain knowledge.We evaluate the efficacy of this framework using three LLMs ( Llama, GPT-4o, and Gemma) for domains such as air travel, gaming, and fitness. We also experiment with advanced prompting strategies such as ReAct and Reflexion. We find that though GPT-4o and Llama demonstrate comparable performance, they fail some of basic consistency checks under certain perturbations.
Anthology ID:
2025.trustnlp-main.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2025)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Trista Cao, Anubrata Das, Tharindu Kumarage, Yixin Wan, Satyapriya Krishna, Ninareh Mehrabi, Jwala Dhamala, Anil Ramakrishna, Aram Galystan, Anoop Kumar, Rahul Gupta, Kai-Wei Chang
Venues:
TrustNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
321–334
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.trustnlp-main.22/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Savita Bhat, Ishaan Shukla, and Shirish Karande. 2025. Know Thyself: Validating Knowledge Awareness of LLM-based Persona Agents. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2025), pages 321–334, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Know Thyself: Validating Knowledge Awareness of LLM-based Persona Agents (Bhat et al., TrustNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.trustnlp-main.22.pdf