Papers by Xintao Wang
Can LLMs Learn to Map the World from Local Descriptions? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models can construct coherent global spatial cognition by integrating fragmented relational descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generalize to unseen spatial relationships and exhibit latent representations aligned with real-world spatial distributions. |
Capturing Minds, Not Just Words: Enhancing Role-Playing Language Models with Personality-Indicative Data (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing models focus on character knowledge and tones, but lack personality-indicative data to capture characters' minds. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance role-playing agents (RPAs) via personality-indicative data by asking psychological scales to capture broad aspects of personality traits in individuals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits advanced role-playing capabilities for both general and personality-related evaluations. |
Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on simple settings, but their reliability in complex tasks remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as judges to evaluate reliability in complex tasks . they use a challenge benchmark to expose and quantify Auxiliary Information Induced Biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exposes and quantifies Auxiliary Information Induced Biases across 12 basic and 3 advanced scenarios. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
Ground Every Sentence: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LLMs with Interleaved Reference-Claim Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance credibility and verifiability of large language models (LLMs) mainly focus on passage-level or paragraph-level references or citations, which fall short in verifikatability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides sentence-level citations in LLM-generated responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 90% accuracy in long-form question-answering tasks. |
Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Works (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed numerous AI applications, among which role-playing agents (RPAs) are particularly popular. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs' character understanding capability via the character profiling task, i.e., summarizing character profiles from corresponding materials, a widely adopted yet understudied practice for RPA development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and literature summarization methods and proves its ability to understand fictional characters in downstream tasks. |
Light Up the Shadows: Enhance Long-Tailed Entity Grounding with Concept-Guided Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) are knowledge graphs that integrate and align information from diverse modalities (e.g., text and images). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates image-text pairs of long-tailed entities and a concept guidance module that offers explainability and enables human verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of recognizing long-tailed image-text pairs compared to baselines and also offers flexibility and explainability. |
BOOKWORLD: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Story Creation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled social simulation through multi-agent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for constructing and simulating book-based multi-agent societies that simulates established fictional worlds and characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality stories while maintaining fidelity to the source books, surpassing previous methods with a win rate of 75.36%. |
Guess What I am Thinking: A Benchmark for Inner Thought Reasoning of Role-Playing Language Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs) have attracted broad attention in various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating character thought generation using literature . they propose 'MIRROR' which generates character thoughts by retrieving memories, predicting character reactions, and synthesizing motivations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing methods in evaluating character thought generation. |
HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns (2026.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Jian Yang, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xie, Jen-tse Huang, Jun Gao, Shuai Huang, Yueping Kang, Yuanli Guo, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats psychological patterns as interacting causal forces and synthesizes 113 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4 fewer parameters. |
Character is Destiny: Can Persona-assigned Language Models Make Personal Choices? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rui Xu, Xintao Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Siyu Yuan, Xinfeng Yuan, Jiaqing Liang, Zulong Chen, null Xiaoqingdong, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent research has demonstrated the potential of using LLMs to develop role-playing language agents (RPLAs) however, imitative decision-making necessitates a more nuanced understanding of personas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses persona-based memory retrieval to improve RPLAs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances RPLAs on this task. |