Nutchanon Yongsatianchot

Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, Parisa Ghanad Torshizi, Stacy Marsella

Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT have significantly advanced in recent years and are now being used by the general public. As more people interact with these systems, improving our understanding of these black box models is crucial, especially regarding their understanding of human psychological aspects. In this work, we investigate their emotion perception through the lens of appraisal and coping theory using the Stress and Coping Process Questionaire (SCPQ). SCPQ is a validated clinical instrument consisting of multiple stories that evolve over time and differ in key appraisal variables such as controllability and changeability. We applied SCPQ to three recent LLMs from OpenAI, davinci-003, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 and compared the results with predictions from the appraisal theory and human data. The results show that LLMs' responses are similar to humans in terms of dynamics of appraisal and coping, but their responses did not differ along key appraisal dimensions as predicted by the theory and data. The magnitude of their responses is also quite different from humans in several variables. We also found that GPTs can be quite sensitive to instruction and how questions are asked. This work adds to the growing literature evaluating the psychological aspects of LLMs and helps enrich our understanding of the current models.

Laura B. Hensel, Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, Parisa Torshizi et al.

Gestures perform a variety of communicative functions that powerfully influence human face-to-face interaction. How this communicative function is achieved varies greatly between individuals and depends on the role of the speaker and the context of the interaction. Approaches to automatic gesture generation vary not only in the degree to which they rely on data-driven techniques but also the degree to which they can produce context and speaker specific gestures. However, these approaches face two major challenges: The first is obtaining sufficient training data that is appropriate for the context and the goal of the application. The second is related to designer control to realize their specific intent for the application. Here, we approach these challenges by using large language models (LLMs) to show that these powerful models of large amounts of data can be adapted for gesture analysis and generation. Specifically, we used ChatGPT as a tool for suggesting context-specific gestures that can realize designer intent based on minimal prompts. We also find that ChatGPT can suggests novel yet appropriate gestures not present in the minimal training data. The use of LLMs is a promising avenue for gesture generation that reduce the need for laborious annotations and has the potential to flexibly and quickly adapt to different designer intents.

Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, Tobias Thejll-Madsen, Stacy Marsella

Large Language Models (LLM) have recently been shown to perform well at various tasks from language understanding, reasoning, storytelling, and information search to theory of mind. In an extension of this work, we explore the ability of GPT-4 to solve tasks related to emotion prediction. GPT-4 performs well across multiple emotion tasks; it can distinguish emotion theories and come up with emotional stories. We show that by prompting GPT-4 to identify key factors of an emotional experience, it is able to manipulate the emotional intensity of its own stories. Furthermore, we explore GPT-4's ability on reverse appraisals by asking it to predict either the goal, belief, or emotion of a person using the other two. In general, GPT-4 can make the correct inferences. We suggest that LLMs could play an important role in affective modeling; however, they will not fully replace works that attempt to model the mechanisms underlying emotion-related processes.

Hui Sophie Wang, Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, Stacy Marsella

Hurricanes cause significant economic and human costs, requiring individuals to make critical evacuation decisions under uncertainty and stress. To enhance the understanding of this decision-making process, we propose using Bayesian Networks (BNs) to model evacuation decisions during hurricanes. We collected questionnaire data from two significant hurricane events: Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. We employed a data-driven approach by first conducting variable selection using mutual information, followed by BN structure learning with two constraint-based algorithms. The robustness of the learned structures was enhanced by model averaging based on bootstrap resampling. We examined and compared the learned structures of both hurricanes, revealing potential causal relationships among key predictors of evacuation, including risk perception, information received from media, suggestions from family and friends, and neighbors evacuating. Our findings highlight the significant role of social influence, providing valuable insights into the process of evacuation decision-making. Our results demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of data-driven BN modeling in evacuation decision making.

Perapard Ngokpol, Kun Kerdthaisong, Pasin Buakhaw et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as role-playing agents, yet their capacity to faithfully and consistently portray version-specific characters -- for example, superheroes across comic and cinematic universes -- remains underexplored. Superhero canons such as Marvel and DC provide a rich testbed: decades of storytelling yield multiple incarnations of the same character with distinct histories, values, and moral codes. To study this problem, we introduce Beyond One World, a benchmark for character-grounded roleplay spanning 30 iconic heroes and 90 canon-specific versions. The benchmark comprises two tasks: (i) Canon Events, which probes factual recall of pivotal life stages, and (ii) Moral Dilemmas, which confronts models with ethically charged scenarios. We score responses for canonical accuracy and reasoning fidelity under a framework that separates internal deliberation ("thinking") from outward decisions ("acting"). We further propose Think-Act Matching, a metric that quantifies alignment between reasons and actions and serves as a proxy for model trustworthiness. Experiments across reasoning- and non-reasoning-oriented models yield three findings: (1) chain-of-thought prompting improves narrative coherence in weaker models but can reduce canonical accuracy in stronger ones; (2) cross-version generalization within a character remains a major obstacle; and (3) models often excel at either thinking or acting, but rarely both. Beyond One World exposes critical gaps in multiversal consistency and reasoning alignment, offering a challenging evaluation for role-playing LLMs.

Pasin Buakhaw, Kun Kerdthaisong, Phuree Phenhiran et al.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for creating dynamic non-player characters (NPCs) in gaming environments, enabling both functional task execution and persona-consistent dialogue generation. In this paper, we (Tu_Character_lab) report our participation in the Commonsense Persona-Grounded Dialogue Challenge (CPDC) 2025 Round 2, which evaluates agents across three tracks: task-oriented dialogue, context-aware dialogue, and their integration. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: (i) lightweight prompting techniques in the API track, including a Deflanderization prompting method to suppress excessive role-play and improve task fidelity, and (ii) fine-tuned large models in the GPU track, leveraging Qwen3-14B with supervisedfinetuning (SFT) and Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA). Our best submissions ranked 2nd on Task 1, 2nd on Task 3 (API track), and 4th on Task 3 (GPU track).