HEART-Bench: Do LLMs Make Persona-Consistent Decisions?

Abstract

LLM agents in interactive entertainment and social applications, including companions, role-play characters, and persona clones, need decisions grounded in personality and past experiences. We introduce HEART-Bench to evaluate memory-grounded persona-consistent response selection. The benchmark combines 11 Big Five-anchored synthetic characters, each with 1,000 autobiographical memories, and 64 DIAMONDS-guided decision scenarios into 673 multiple-choice questions. Domain experts independently compare candidate responses, with a senior expert resolving disagreements and revising responses when needed; other characters' adjudicated responses to the same scenario serve as distractors. In the main evaluation, models receive character IDs and occupations, scenarios, and options, with retrieved memories added in memory-augmented settings. Detailed personality-and-value profiles are withheld. We evaluate 16 LLMs under No-Retrieval, Naive-RAG, Mem0, and PersonaDB. Accuracy without memories stays near the 25% chance level, and the best memory-augmented configuration reaches 64.9%. On a matched 150-item subset, human annotators reach 80.8%, compared with 64.0% for the best model. Memory-content ablations show the importance of retrieving experiences that match both the target character and the decision context.

arXiv commentGitHub: https://github.com/peng-weihan/HEART-BENCH