Abstract
Long-term persona agents must remain identifiable while adapting to new events, relationships, evidence, and social conditions. We identify self-locking as a runtime failure mode in continuing persona-life loops: locally plausible events keep appearing while the generated life collapses toward familiar environments, weak relationships, suspended decisions, and stale life stages. We trace this failure to model-level convergence toward high-probability behavioral channels and system-level context gravity from state, memory, history, and environment summaries.
We introduce AutoPersonas, a multi-timescale life-environment engine for bounded persona-level recursive self-evolution. It separates environment-side occurrences, accumulated observations, and persona state. Its OSO loop admits divergent future-facing material while requiring evidence-governed absorption before state or reachability changes.
A three-year compressed simulation exposed environment watermark shells, occurrence-hardening gaps, slow-change accumulation failures, recursive indecision, and weak relationship persistence. An eight-model 40-day stress test generated 1,600 events and found mean rolling 5-day action-category repetition of 95.2%-97.6%, with all models crossing 90% by day 11. Semantic re-keeping found 79.0%-88.0% macro-theme repetition across all direct-loop runs. In a same-runtime 40-day A/B, context-slice masking plus per-sample divergence targeting reduced macro-theme repetition from 61.8% to 36.3% and roughly doubled cumulative theme count. A juvenile-goblin fictional-world run reproduced the anti-fixation regime without hard real-world intrusions. These results support a bounded claim: separating controlled divergence from evidence-governed absorption can reduce persona-environment self-locking while preserving identity continuity.
Blogger's Review: The research on AutoPersonas offers a fresh perspective on the long-term adaptability of persona agents, effectively mitigating self-locking issues through a multi-timescale looping mechanism. The innovation lies in separating environment from persona state, allowing characters to thrive in complex social contexts while maintaining coherence. The potential applications are vast and worthy of attention.