[Paper] Agentic Persona Generation with Critique-Refinement: An Industrial Evaluation

Source: arXiv - 2606.09637v1

Overview

Personas are widely used in software engineering to support requirements elicitation, design, and validation, but their manual creation is costly, time-consuming, and hard to scale. Recent LLM-based approaches automate persona generation from textual data; however, they typically rely on single-shot generation and subjective evaluations, limiting practical reliability. We present PerGent, an industry-grade method for persona generation built around an iterative critique-refinement loop. Specifically, PerGent uses a generator and a critic LLM agent, coordinated by an orchestrator, to iteratively refine personas using external resources such as interviews, surveys, and job postings through a critique-refinement loop with a user-defined maximum number of rounds. We deploy and evaluate PerGent in an industrial setting at Kinaxis, comparing it with three baselines, including one-shot methods. In an expert in-situ evaluation, PerGent achieved the highest expert approval rate (96.9%), exceeding all baselines. We further compare PerGent-generated personas with best-practice personas manually created by domain experts prior to the adoption of LLMs. Compared to baselines, PerGent reproduces a larger proportion of expert content while also contributing substantial new content beyond the pre-LLM personas. We conclude with lessons learned from deploying and evaluating PerGent at Kinaxis.

Key Contributions

This paper presents research in the following areas:

• cs.SE

Methodology

Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.

Practical Implications

This research contributes to the advancement of cs.SE.

Authors

• Mohammad Hossein Amini
• David Dewar
• Shiva Nejati
• Mehrdad Sabetzadeh

Paper Information

• arXiv ID: 2606.09637v1
• Categories: cs.SE
• Published: June 8, 2026
• PDF: Download PDF