English

HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns

Computation and Language 2026-04-20 v4

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). However, achieving authentic alignment with human cognitive and behavioral patterns remains a critical challenge for these agents. We present HumanLLM, a framework treating psychological patterns as interacting causal forces. We construct 244 patterns from \sim12,000 academic papers and synthesize 11,359 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other, with multi-turn conversations expressing inner thoughts, actions, and dialogue. Our dual-level checklists evaluate both individual pattern fidelity and emergent multi-pattern dynamics, achieving strong human alignment (r=0.90r=0.90) while revealing that holistic metrics conflate simulation accuracy with social desirability. HumanLLM-8B outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4×\times fewer parameters, demonstrating that authentic anthropomorphism requires cognitive modeling -- simulating not just what humans do, but the psychological processes generating those behaviors. Our dataset, code, and model are available at:https://github.com/YJGoodbye2024/HumanLLM

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.10198,
  title  = {HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns},
  author = {Xintao Wang and Jian Yang and Weiyuan Li and Rui Xie and Jen-tse Huang and Jun Gao and Shuai Huang and Yueping Kang and Yuanli Gou and Hongwei Feng and Yanghua Xiao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.10198},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACL 2026 Main Conference

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:05:31.110Z