Research

We study the science of digital clones — how to faithfully reproduce individuals and collectives as manipulable computational objects, and how to deploy them in governance, content, and agent systems.

Publications & Papers

1 Items

PsyAgent: Constructing Human-like Agents Based on Psychological Modeling and Contextual Interaction

Zibin Meng, Kani Chen2026-01-06

A schema-first framework that creates human-like agents by coupling Big Five personality trait modeling with explicit social-structural conditioning across everyday scenarios.

digital clonepersonality modelingLLM agentsBig Five

Research Areas

Four Directions

Behavioral Modeling

Capturing stable individual dispositions and context-sensitive action patterns from trace data — comments, votes, transactions — rather than questionnaires.

Big Five trait priorsStance stability over timeContextual role modeling

Audience Cognition

Cloning the cognitive diversity of a community — segmenting viewers by attention, reasoning style, and risk cognition instead of demographics.

Cognitive Archetype Extraction (CAE)Reaction simulationSensitivity heatmaps

Governance Simulation

Forecasting collective outcomes before real votes take place — token-weighted simulation over digital clones of on-chain participants.

DAO proposal predictionVoter clone modelingParticipation forecasting

Personality Transfer

Data-efficient fine-tuning that transfers stable personality into compact backbones — schema-first prompts, PEFT, and psychometric evaluation.

Schema-first promptingPEFT / SFT / DPOPsychometric evaluation

Team

Digital Clone Initiative

Kani Chen

Lab Director · Professor

Department of Mathematics, HKUST

Director of the HKUST Crypto-Fintech Lab. Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Industrial Engineering & Decision Analytics. PhD in Statistics from Columbia University (1994); BSc & MSc from Peking University. Research spans statistics, mathematical finance, and the commercialization of fintech research, with a focus on nurturing student-led startups.

Faculty Profile Google Scholar

Zhenhang Shang

Researcher

Crypto-Fintech Lab, HKUST

Digital Clone initiative at the Crypto-Fintech Lab. Works across the full stack of the lab's audience-cognition and behavioral-modeling projects.

Jianda Mao

Researcher

Crypto-Fintech Lab, HKUST

Contributor to the lab's digital clone and AI-agent research lines.

Yingzhe Yu

Researcher

Crypto-Fintech Lab, HKUST

Contributor to the lab's digital clone and AI-agent research lines.