Persona Generators

Persona Generators: Evolutionary LLM Method for Diverse Synthetic Human Personas

Google researchers Davide Paglieri, Logan Cross, and colleagues propose Persona Generators, a system that uses the AlphaEvolve evolutionary algorithm to generate code that produces 25 diverse persona prompts covering a broad range of attitudes and opinions. The method iteratively optimizes persona prompt diversity using six metrics, outperforming Nemotron Personas (82% vs 76% coverage of possible responses) and a Concordia memory-based baseline (46%). The system uses Gemini 2.5 Pro for questionnaire generation and Gemma 3-27B-IT for persona simulation via the Concordia agent library. The approach reframes persona generation as a coverage optimization problem rather than a data-matching one, enabling more representative synthetic user populations for product research.