HACHIMI: Scalable and Controllable Student Persona Generation via Orchestrated Agents
Organizations: East China Normal University, Shanghai, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China
Abstract
Student Personas (SPs) are emerging as infrastructure for educational LLMs, yet prior work often relies on ad-hoc prompting or hand-crafted profiles with limited control over educational theory and population distributions. We formalize this as Theory-Aligned and Distribution-Controllable Persona Generation (TAD-PG) and introduce HACHIMI, a multi-agent Propose-Validate-Revise framework that generates theory-aligned, quota-controlled personas. HACHIMI factorizes each persona into a theory-anchored educational schema, enforces developmental and psychological constraints via a neuro-symbolic validator, and combines stratified sampling with semantic deduplication to reduce mode collapse. The resulting HACHIMI-1M corpus comprises 1 million personas for Grades 1-12. Intrinsic evaluation shows near-perfect schema validity, accurate quotas, and substantial diversity, while external evaluation instantiates personas as student agents answering CEPS and PISA 2022 surveys; across 16 cohorts, math and curiosity/growth constructs align strongly between humans and agents, whereas classroom-climate and well-being constructs are only moderately aligned, revealing a fidelity gradient. All personas are generated with Qwen2.5-72B, and HACHIMI provides a standardized synthetic student population for group-level benchmarking and social-science simulations. Resources available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/HACHIMI
Figures & tables
| Metric | Baseline | HACHIMI | |
| Hard error rate ( ) | 12.03% | 0.00% | |
| Warning rate ( ) | 25.33% | 0.82% | |
| Distinct-1 ( ) | 0.2328 | 0.3285 | |
| Distinct-2 ( ) | 0.4589 | 0.7893 | |
| Near-duplicate pairs ( ) | 157 | 0 |
Appendix figures & tables12 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Field | Responsible Agent |
|---|---|
| id | System |
| Name | Enrollment & Development |
| Age | Enrollment & Development |
| Gender | Enrollment & Development |
| Grade | Enrollment & Development |
| Developmental Stage | Enrollment & Development |
| ID | Rule |
|---|---|
| R1 | Age–grade norm: Grade 1–12 should approximately align with ages 6–18, allowing at most year deviation. |
| R2 | Developmental-stage plausibility: Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg stage labels must remain broadly compatible with the student’s age band. |
| R3 | Strong Subjects and Weak Subjects must both be non-empty and mutually disjoint. |
| R4 | The eight creativity dimensions must show variation rather than identical levels; if feasibility is relatively low/low, proposing solutions cannot exceed a mid-level rating. |
| R5 | If the values field presents stable positive physical/mental health, the mental-health field must not describe severe functional impairment or heavy clinical pathology. |
| R6 | Agent-name regex: ^(?:[a-z]+[1-5]){1,2}_(?:[a-z]+[1-5]){1,3}$ . |
| Field | Content |
|---|---|
| Name (pseudonym) | Shihan Wang |
| Agent ID | wang2_shi1han2 |
| Age / Gender | 13 / Female |
| Grade | Grade 7 (Junior Year 1) |
| Academic standing | Low; bottom 50% in school ranking |
| Strengths | Art |
| Academic Level counts | Gender counts | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade | High | Medium | Low | Poor | Male | Female | Total |
| 1 | 21,154 | 20,942 | 21,257 | 21,182 | 42,197 | 42,338 | 84,535 |
| 2 | 21,298 | 21,026 | 21,150 | 21,165 | 42,192 | 42,447 | 84,639 |
| 3 | 21,116 | 21,329 | 21,111 | 21,240 | 42,306 | 42,490 | 84,796 |
| 4 | 21,234 | 21,093 | 20,909 | 20,749 | 41,962 | 42,023 | 83,985 |
| 5 | 21,267 | 20,632 | 21,226 | 21,249 | 42,237 | 42,137 | 84,374 |
| Metric | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| # personas | 151,426 | merged corpus size |
| Error rate | 0.0000 | fraction with hard error |
| Warning rate | 0.0006 | fraction with warning |
| Distinct-1 | 0.4044 | over values/creativity/psychology |
| Distinct-2 | 0.8296 | over values/creativity/psychology |
| Near-duplicate pairs | 0 | SimHash, Hamming |
| Variable | KL Divergence |
|---|---|
| Grade | 0.0001 |
| Gender | 0.0000 |
| Academic level | 0.0000 |
| Component | Pearson |
|---|---|
| Values | 0.7671 |
| Creativity | 0.8997 |
| Mental health | 0.8380 |
| Construct | Description | East Asia | S. Europe | Lat. Am. | Mid. East | W. Europe |
| Math Effort & Efficacy | ||||||
| MATHEFF | Mathematics self-efficacy: formal and applied mathematics - response options reversed in 2022 (WLE) | 0.95 | 0.98 | 0.97 | 0.97 | 0.97 |
| MATHEASE | Perception of Mathematics as easier than other subjects | 0.83 | 0.81 | 0.72 | 0.91 | 0.85 |
| MATHEF21 | Mathematics self-efficacy: mathematical reasoning and 21st century skills (WLE) | 0.77 | 0.77 | 0.90 | 0.89 | 0.78 |
| MATHPREF | Preference of Math over other core subjects | 0.83 | 0.92 | 0.60 | 0.90 | 0.85 |
| MATHPERS | Effort and Persistence in Mathematics (WLE) | 0.85 | 0.70 | 0.76 | 0.86 | 0.79 |
| Metric | HACHIMI | Baseline | Notes |
| # personas | 10,000 | 10,000 | merged corpus size |
| Error rate | 0.0000 | 0.1203 | fraction with hard error |
| Warning rate | 0.0082 | 0.2533 | fraction with warning |
| Distinct-1 | 0.3285 | 0.2328 | over values/creativity/psychology |
| Distinct-2 | 0.7893 | 0.4589 | over values/creativity/psychology |
| Near-duplicate pairs | 0 | 157 | SimHash, Hamming |
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