Jian Xie

Jiangjie Chen, Xintao Wang, Rui Xu et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted the rise of Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs), i.e., specialized AI systems designed to simulate assigned personas. By harnessing multiple advanced abilities of LLMs, including in-context learning, instruction following, and social intelligence, RPLAs achieve a remarkable sense of human likeness and vivid role-playing performance. RPLAs can mimic a wide range of personas, ranging from historical figures and fictional characters to real-life individuals. Consequently, they have catalyzed numerous AI applications, such as emotional companions, interactive video games, personalized assistants and copilots, and digital clones. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the evolution and recent progress in RPLAs integrating with cutting-edge LLM technologies. We categorize personas into three types: 1) Demographic Persona, which leverages statistical stereotypes; 2) Character Persona, focused on well-established figures; and 3) Individualized Persona, customized through ongoing user interactions for personalized services. We begin by presenting a comprehensive overview of current methodologies for RPLAs, followed by the details for each persona type, covering corresponding data sourcing, agent construction, and evaluation. Afterward, we discuss the fundamental risks, existing limitations, and future prospects of RPLAs. Additionally, we provide a brief review of RPLAs in AI applications, which reflects practical user demands that shape and drive RPLA research. Through this work, we aim to establish a clear taxonomy of RPLA research and applications, and facilitate future research in this critical and ever-evolving field, and pave the way for a future where humans and RPLAs coexist in harmony.

Jian Xie, Kexun Zhang, Jiangjie Chen et al.

Autonomous planning has been an ongoing pursuit since the inception of artificial intelligence. Based on curated problem solvers, early planning agents could deliver precise solutions for specific tasks but lacked generalization. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) and their powerful reasoning capabilities has reignited interest in autonomous planning by automatically generating reasonable solutions for given tasks. However, prior research and our experiments show that current language agents still lack human-level planning abilities. Even the state-of-the-art reasoning model, OpenAI o1, achieves only 15.6% on one of the complex real-world planning benchmarks. This highlights a critical question: What hinders language agents from achieving human-level planning? Although existing studies have highlighted weak performance in agent planning, the deeper underlying issues and the mechanisms and limitations of the strategies proposed to address them remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we apply the feature attribution study and identify two key factors that hinder agent planning: the limited role of constraints and the diminishing influence of questions. We also find that although current strategies help mitigate these challenges, they do not fully resolve them, indicating that agents still have a long way to go before reaching human-level intelligence.

Yikai Zhang, Ye Rong, Siyu Yuan et al.

Existing language agents often encounter difficulties in dynamic adversarial games due to poor strategic reasoning. To mitigate this limitation, a promising approach is to allow agents to learn from game interactions automatically, without relying on costly expert-labeled data. Unlike static environments where agents receive fixed feedback or rewards, selecting appropriate opponents in dynamic adversarial games can significantly impact learning performance. However, the discussion of opponents in adversarial environments remains an area under exploration. In this paper, we propose a Step-level poliCy Optimization method through Play-And-Learn, SCO-PAL. Leveraging SCO-PAL, we conduct a detailed analysis of opponent selection by setting opponents at different levels and find that self-play is the most effective way to improve strategic reasoning in such adversarial environments. Utilizing SCO-PAL with self-play, we increase the average win rate against four opponents by approximately 30% compared to baselines and achieve a 54.76% win rate against GPT-4 in six adversarial games.