用生命轨迹记忆提升大模型代理的社会多样性,避免群体刻板印象。
Mitigating Identity Essentialism in LLM Agents with Longitudinal Life Trajectories

- 引入纵向生活事件记忆框架LifeMem,结合结构化检索与参数化记忆。
- 在Add Health和Understanding Society数据集上显著提升个体与群体多样性。
- 适合构建更真实、动态演化的社会模拟代理的研究者使用。
大语言模型为社会模拟提供了可扩展的方案,但其可信度取决于代理的构建方式。现有方法虽能部分再现宏观群体模式,却常无法捕捉人类应有的多样性。分析表明,静态属性代理表现出更强的群体分离与组内压缩,这符合身份本质主义特征:模型将群体平均倾向误当作个体特质,导致组内响应同质化。这一局限源于两个相关因素:稀疏且静态的代理表征,以及仅靠提示词的记忆难以持久整合经验。受互补记忆系统的启发,我们提出LifeMem——一种结合结构化生活事件检索与代理专属参数化记忆的纵向记忆框架,用于经验整合。在Add Health和Understanding Society数据集上,使用三种LLM的实验显示,LifeMem在响应分布、总体及组内多样性,以及跨人生阶段的个体内响应变化模式等方面,均显著优于基线,更贴近人类数据。结果凸显了纵向生活事件记忆在构建更忠实、动态演化社会代理中的价值。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable approach to social simulation, but their credibility depends on how agents are constructed. Existing methods can partially reproduce population-level patterns, yet often fail to capture human-like diversity. Our analysis shows that static-profile agents exhibit stronger demographic separation and within-group compression than humans, a pattern consistent with identity essentialism: demographic labels can encourage models to treat group-average tendencies as individual traits, homogenizing responses within groups. We argue that this limitation arises from two related factors: sparse, static agent representations and the limited ability of prompt-only memory to persistently integrate experience. Inspired by complementary memory systems, we propose LifeMem, a longitudinal memory framework that combines structured life-event retrieval with agent-specific parametric memory for experience integration. Experiments on Add Health and Understanding Society with three LLMs show that LifeMem improves alignment with human data in terms of response distributions, overall and within-group diversity, and patterns of within-person response change across life stages. These findings highlight the value of longitudinal life-event memory for constructing more faithful and dynamically evolving social agents.
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