Yu Li

Yu Li, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Yada Pruksachatkun et al.

Simulating real personalities with large language models requires grounding generation in authentic personal data. Existing evaluation approaches rely on demographic surveys, personality questionnaires, or short AI-led interviews as proxies, but lack direct assessment against what individuals actually said. We address this gap with an interview-grounded evaluation framework for personality simulation at a large scale. We extract over 671,000 question-answer pairs from 23,000 verified interview transcripts across 1,000 public personalities, each with an average of 11.5 hours of interview content. We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework with four complementary metrics measuring content similarity, factual consistency, personality alignment, and factual knowledge retention. Through systematic comparison, we demonstrate that methods grounded in real interview data substantially outperform those relying solely on biographical profiles or the model's parametric knowledge. We further reveal a trade-off in how interview data is best utilized: retrieval-augmented methods excel at capturing personality style and response quality, while chronological-based methods better preserve factual consistency and knowledge retention. Our evaluation framework enables principled method selection based on application requirements, and our empirical findings provide actionable insights for advancing personality simulation research.

Yu Li, Yujun Cai, Chi Zhang

Personalized image generation requires effectively balancing content fidelity with stylistic consistency when synthesizing images based on text and reference examples. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers an efficient personalization approach, with potential for precise control through combining LoRA weights on different concepts. However, existing combination techniques face persistent challenges: entanglement between content and style representations, insufficient guidance for controlling elements' influence, and unstable weight fusion that often require additional training. We address these limitations through CRAFT-LoRA, with complementary components: (1) rank-constrained backbone fine-tuning that injects low-rank projection residuals to encourage learning decoupled content and style subspaces; (2) a prompt-guided approach featuring an expert encoder with specialized branches that enables semantic extension and precise control through selective adapter aggregation; and (3) a training-free, timestep-dependent classifier-free guidance scheme that enhances generation stability by strategically adjusting noise predictions across diffusion steps. Our method significantly improves content-style disentanglement, enables flexible semantic control over LoRA module combinations, and achieves high-fidelity generation without additional retraining overhead.