Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as conversational agents in healthcare, yet many existing systems treat roles as static prompts and rely on one-shot safety filters. In such designs, it can be difficult to enforce long-horizon responsibilities, stable role identity, and realistic communication behavior. We propose a Self-Evolving LLM Agent that learns from role-based social experience and explicitly models communicator-level individual traits informed by prior communication questionnaires and clinical literature. The agent integrates (i) perception and action conditioned on both hard role responsibility norms and soft trait-conditioned style preferences, (ii) structured memory storing norm-annotated trajectories and identity states, (iii) dual-layer reflection that combines short-term responsibility diagnosis with long-term identity drift detection via trait consistency and trait-norm compatibility checks, and (iv) self-evolution that updates system prompts and identity parameters through preference-style optimization with AI feedback. We instantiate the framework in a multi-role healthcare sandbox and evaluate outpatient medication review, emergency triage, and discharge planning. Across our simulated tasks, self-evolution is associated with lower severity-weighted norm risk, more stable role-identity signals, and improved social embeddedness metrics (including trust-like signals) relative to strong static baselines.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.findings-acl.1133
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 22562–22577
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1133/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Haijie Ruan, Xiaowu Jiang, Zhanpeng LI, Wei Jia, Xuanwu Xu, Xiao-Fen Shan, Shujie Chen, and Xindong Ye. 2026. A Self-Evolving LLM Agent Framework for Role-Based Norm Compliance in Healthcare. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 22562–22577, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Self-Evolving LLM Agent Framework for Role-Based Norm Compliance in Healthcare (Ruan et al., Findings 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1133.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.findings-acl.1133.checklist.pdf























