Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure

The article introduces PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that utilizes a HEXACO-based personality model to generate diverse and realistic virtual patient responses. By allowing fine-grained control over traits such as conversational style and information disclosure, PWP demonstrates improved realism in clinician evaluations compared to prior simulators, significantly reducing the issue of oversharing. This framework enhances the benchmarking of LLMs in clinical applications, facilitating more effective testing without the need for extensive user studies.