SensorPersona: An LLM-Empowered System for Continual Persona Extraction from Longitudinal Mobile Sensor Streams
Organizations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR · Columbia University, United States
Abstract
Personalization is essential for Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents to adapt to users' preferences and improve response quality and task performance. However, most existing approaches infer personas from chat histories, which capture only self-disclosed information rather than users' everyday behaviors in the physical world, limiting the ability to infer comprehensive user personas. In this work, we introduce SensorPersona, an LLM-empowered system that continuously infers stable user personas from multimodal longitudinal sensor streams unobtrusively collected from users' mobile devices. SensorPersona first performs person-oriented context encoding on continuous sensor streams to enrich the semantics of sensor contexts. It then employs hierarchical persona reasoning that integrates intra- and inter-episode reasoning to infer personas spanning physical patterns, psychosocial traits, and life experiences. Finally, it employs clustering-aware incremental verification and temporal evidence-aware updating to adapt to evolving personas. We evaluate SensorPersona on a self-collected dataset containing 1,580 hours of sensor data from 20 participants, collected over up to 3 months across 17 cities on 3 continents. Results show that SensorPersona achieves up to 31.4% higher recall in persona extraction, an 85.7% win rate in persona-aware agent responses, and notable improvements in user satisfaction compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Figures & tables
| Methods | Multi- Modal | Long- Term | Open- Ended | System Outputs | System Setting |
| Mem0 ( Chhikara et al., 2025 ) | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ | Personas | Chatbot |
| M3-Agent ( Long et al., 2025 ) | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | Episodes | Camera |
| AutoLife ( Xu et al., 2025a ) | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | Episodes | Smartphone |
| ContextLLM ( Post et al., 2025 ) | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | Episodes | Wearables |
| MobileMiner ( Srinivasan et al., 2014 ) | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | Behaviors | Smartphone |
| SensorPersona | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | Personas | Smartphone |
| Category | Count | Details |
| Participants | 20 | 10 male, 10 female. |
| Age | N.A. | 18–63 years old (mean ). |
| Cities | 17 | The cities 1 1 1 Specific city names in our self-collected dataset are anonymized throughout the paper for double-blind review. span three continents (Europe, North America, and Asia), with inter-city distances ranging from about 27 km to 12,955 km. |
| Duration | N.A. | 3 months, totaling 1580 hours of multimodal sensor streams from smartphones. |
| Modalities | 7 | GPS, Audio, IMU, Network (WiFi SSID, Cellular), battery level, step counts, screen brightness. |
| Smartphone | 13 | iPhone (8–17 series), Pixel 7, Huawei Mate 40, OnePlus Ace 3 Pro, Xiaomi 12S Ultra, and vivo S17 Pro |
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
User Modeling
User modeling represents people's interests, knowledge, goals, and changing behavior to personalize predictions and AI assistance.
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