THEATRON: A Benchmark for Evaluating Persona Persistence in Long-Horizon LLM Decision-Making

Yuyan Wang, Yuechen Jiang, Zhiwei Liu, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou

Existing evaluations often test persona expression rather than whether persona information persists in extended decision-making. We introduce THEATRON, a controlled benchmark that uses financial replay to evaluate persona persistence in long-horizon sequential decision-making. In these environments, models conditioned on fixed behavioral-finance personas observe shared daily market evidence and trajectory-specific account-state feedback and make sequential decisions over multi-month trajectories. We evaluate Zero-Shot, One-Shot, and Chain-of-Thought persona injection across four LLMs, using cumulative-return and action trajectories to diagnose within-persona stability, cross-persona separability, and action collapse. Persona conditioning produces systematic behavioral shifts beyond a no-persona baseline, and persona-level separation generally exceeds the variation induced by semantically equivalent descriptions. Nevertheless, these shifts do not reliably form coherent persona-specific policies: apparently stable separation can arise from stereotyped action collapse, while diverse policies can exhibit noisy trajectory switching. These findings expose a gap between observable…