English

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

Artificial Intelligence 2026-03-03 v2

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.06158,
  title  = {PsyAgent: Constructing Human-like Agents Based on Psychological Modeling and Contextual Interaction},
  author = {Zibin Meng and Kani Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.06158},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:58:17.595Z