Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.25206

A Thousand Faces: A Persuasion Benchmark with Experience-Grounded Persuadees Informed by Psychology and Pragmatics

Abstract

People can express the same beliefs and desires yet need different reasons to change their minds. What makes an argument relevant depends on how those views arose: experiences shape what a person finds credible, what matters to them, and what could prompt reconsideration. These personal grounds may also be expressed indirectly, through contextual clues in conversation. Benchmarks that specify beliefs and desires without these connections can reward arguments that match a description while overlooking whether they address the person's reasons. We introduce A Thousand Faces (ATF-Persu), with 1,000 personas across 200 topics and nine domains. Drawing on personality and attitude theories and conversational implicature, we construct five personas per factual context, linking experiences to judgments, expression, and grounds for revision. Evaluations show lower persuasion success than three comparison benchmarks under their respective protocols. Complete backgrounds yield broader use of supplied personal grounds and higher persona faithfulness than simplified specifications; blinded reviewers also rate ATF-Persu above CToMPersu on identifiable personal reasons, their influence on responses, and contextual expression. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Slandes/ATF-Persu.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ziqing Zhuang, Dingyi Zhang, Deyu Zhou. 2026-10-18. A Thousand Faces: A Persuasion Benchmark with Experience-Grounded Persuadees Informed by Psychology and Pragmatics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25206

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Post-hoc Disentanglement of Textual and Acoustic Features in Pre-trained Speech Encoders

Pre-trained speech models build entangled internal representations, which capture a variety of features (e.g., pitch, loudness, syntax, or semantics of an utterance) in a distributed encoding. This entanglement makes it difficult to track how such representations rely on textual versus acoustic information when used in downstream applications, limiting their interpretability and transparency. In this paper, we explore an approach to post-hoc disentanglement that builds on the Information Bottleneck principle. We take representations from pre-trained speech encoders as input, and separate them into two distinct components in a cascaded fashion: first we learn a vector encoding content (i.e., what can be transcribed as text), and nothing else; second, we learn a vector encoding all complementary acoustic features relevant to a target task. We apply and evaluate our proposed setup to emotion recognition and speaker identification target tasks, quantifying the relative contribution of textual and acoustic features at each model layer. Finally, we use the approach for disentangled feature attribution as it allows us to identify the most salient speech frames from both the textual and acoustic perspectives.

cs.CL↗

The Super Emotion Dataset

Despite the wide-scale usage and development of emotion classification datasets in NLP, the field lacks a standardized, large-scale resource that follows a psychologically grounded taxonomy. Existing datasets either use inconsistent emotion categories, suffer from limited sample size, or focus on specific domains. The SuperEmotion dataset addresses this gap by harmonizing diverse text sources into a unified framework based on Shaver's empirically validated emotion taxonomy, enabling more consistent cross-domain emotion recognition research. This report describes version 2 of the dataset. We also report baseline results for a fine-tuned ModernBERT encoder.

cs.CL↗

AutoMind: Adaptive Knowledgeable Agent for Automated Data Science

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown great potential in addressing real-world data science problems. LLM-driven data science agents promise to automate the entire machine learning pipeline, yet their real-world effectiveness remains limited. Existing frameworks depend on rigid, pre-defined workflows and inflexible coding strategies; consequently, they excel only on relatively simple, classical problems and fail to capture the empirical expertise that human practitioners bring to complex, innovative tasks. In this work, we introduce AutoMind, an adaptive, knowledgeable LLM-agent framework that overcomes these deficiencies through three key advances: (1) a curated expert knowledge base that grounds the agent in domain expert knowledge, (2) an agentic knowledgeable tree search algorithm that strategically explores possible solutions, and (3) a self-adaptive coding strategy that dynamically tailors code generation to task complexity. Evaluations on two automated data science benchmarks demonstrate that AutoMind delivers superior performance versus state-of-the-art baselines. Additional analyses confirm favorable effectiveness, efficiency, and qualitative solution quality, highlighting AutoMind as an efficient and robust step toward fully automated data science. Code is at https://github.com/zjunlp/AutoMind.

cs.CL↗