On the Decision-Making Abilities in Role-Playing using Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are now increasingly utilized for role-playing tasks, especially in impersonating domain-specific experts, primarily through role-playing prompts. When interacting in real-world scenarios, the decision-making abilities of a role significantly shape its behavioral patterns. In this paper, we concentrate on evaluating the decision-making abilities of LLMs post role-playing thereby validating the efficacy of role-playing. Our goal is to provide metrics and guidance for enhancing the decision-making abilities of LLMs in role-playing tasks. Specifically, we first use LLMs to generate virtual role descriptions corresponding to the 16 personality types of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (abbreviated as MBTI) representing a segmentation of the population. Then we design specific quantitative operations to evaluate the decision-making abilities of LLMs post role-playing from four aspects: adaptability, exploration$\&$exploitation trade-off ability, reasoning ability, and safety. Finally, we analyze the association between the performance of decision-making and the corresponding MBTI types through GPT-4. Extensive experiments demonstrate stable differences in the four aspects of decision-making abilities across distinct roles, signifying a robust correlation between decision-making abilities and the roles emulated by LLMs. These results underscore that LLMs can effectively impersonate varied roles while embodying their genuine sociological characteristics.

HyperBandit: Contextual Bandit with Hypernewtork for Time-Varying User Preferences in Streaming Recommendation

In real-world streaming recommender systems, user preferences often dynamically change over time (e.g., a user may have different preferences during weekdays and weekends). Existing bandit-based streaming recommendation models only consider time as a timestamp, without explicitly modeling the relationship between time variables and time-varying user preferences. This leads to recommendation models that cannot quickly adapt to dynamic scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a contextual bandit approach using hypernetwork, called HyperBandit, which takes time features as input and dynamically adjusts the recommendation model for time-varying user preferences. Specifically, HyperBandit maintains a neural network capable of generating the parameters for estimating time-varying rewards, taking into account the correlation between time features and user preferences. Using the estimated time-varying rewards, a bandit policy is employed to make online recommendations by learning the latent item contexts. To meet the real-time requirements in streaming recommendation scenarios, we have verified the existence of a low-rank structure in the parameter matrix and utilize low-rank factorization for efficient training. Theoretically, we demonstrate a sublinear regret upper bound against the best policy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed HyperBandit consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of accumulated rewards.