PsyAgent: Constructing Human-like Agents Based on Psychological Modeling and Contextual Interaction

Zibin Meng; Kani Chen

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arXiv · 2601.06158

PsyAgent: Constructing Human-like Agents Based on Psychological Modeling and Contextual Interaction

Zibin Meng·Kani Chen

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Abstract

Human-like agents must express stable dispositions while adapting to roles, relationships, and norms. We present PsyAgent, a schema-first framework that operationalizes the trait-context interface by coupling a Big Five trait prior with explicit social-structural conditioning. PsyAgent comprises (i) Individual Structure (IS), a machine-usable trait-grounded profile, and (ii) Multi-Scenario Contexting (MSC), a curated library of role-relationship-norm frames spanning eight everyday arenas. At inference, fixed structured prompts couple the active MSC frame with the IS profile, encouraging behavior that is stable yet context-sensitive. To demonstrate learnability beyond prompt engineering, we use IS and MSC to synthesize supervision and fine-tune compact backbones with PEFT (SFT and optional DPO). Under a controlled psychometric-style evaluation protocol in percentile space, PsyAgent improves trait-faithfulness and long-horizon stability, and is competitive with several larger general-purpose instruction-tuned baselines under matched decoding and scoring controls. We further triangulate the automatic protocol with external benchmarks and a small blinded human study. Overall, PsyAgent provides a precise and data-efficient approach to personality-grounded, norm-aware agents.

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Zibin Meng, Kani Chen. 2026-01-06. PsyAgent: Constructing Human-like Agents Based on Psychological Modeling and Contextual Interaction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06158

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