CoSER: Coordinating LLM-Based Persona Simulation of Established Roles

Role-playing language agents (RPLAs) have emerged as promising applications of large language models (LLMs). However, simulating established characters presents a challenging task for RPLAs, due to the lack of authentic character datasets and nuanced evaluation methods using such data. In this paper, we present CoSER, a collection of a high-quality dataset, open models, and an evaluation protocol towards effective RPLAs of established characters. The CoSER dataset covers 17,966 characters from 771 renowned books. It provides authentic dialogues with real-world intricacies, as well as diverse data types such as conversation setups, character experiences and internal thoughts. Drawing from acting methodology, we introduce given-circumstance acting for training and evaluating role-playing LLMs, where LLMs sequentially portray multiple characters in book scenes. Using our dataset, we develop CoSER 8B and CoSER 70B, i.e., advanced open role-playing LLMs built on LLaMA-3.1 models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the value of the CoSER dataset for RPLA training, evaluation and retrieval. Moreover, CoSER 70B exhibits state-of-the-art performance surpassing or matching GPT-4o on our evaluation and three existing benchmarks, i.e., achieving 75.80% and 93.47% accuracy on the InCharacter and LifeChoice benchmarks respectively.

Capturing Minds, Not Just Words: Enhancing Role-Playing Language Models with Personality-Indicative Data

Role-playing agents (RPA) have been a popular application area for large language models (LLMs), attracting significant interest from both industry and academia.While existing RPAs well portray the characters' knowledge and tones, they face challenges in capturing their minds, especially for small role-playing language models (RPLMs). In this paper, we propose to enhance RPLMs via personality-indicative data. Specifically, we leverage questions from psychological scales and distill advanced RPAs to generate dialogues that grasp the minds of characters. Experimental results validate that RPLMs trained with our dataset exhibit advanced role-playing capabilities for both general and personality-related evaluations. Code and data are available at \href{https://github.com/alienet1109/RolePersonality}{this URL}.

Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Works

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance and spurred numerous AI applications, in which role-playing agents (RPAs) are particularly popular, especially for fictional characters. The prerequisite for these RPAs lies in the capability of LLMs to understand characters from fictional works. Previous efforts have evaluated this capability via basic classification tasks or characteristic imitation, failing to capture the nuanced character understanding with LLMs. In this paper, we propose evaluating LLMs' character understanding capability via the character profiling task, i.e., summarizing character profiles from corresponding materials, a widely adopted yet understudied practice for RPA development. Specifically, we construct the CroSS dataset from literature experts and assess the generated profiles by comparing ground truth references and their applicability in downstream tasks. Our experiments, which cover various summarization methods and LLMs, have yielded promising results. These results strongly validate the character understanding capability of LLMs. We believe our constructed resource will promote further research in this field. Resources are available at https://github.com/Joanna0123/character_profiling.

Character is Destiny: Can Large Language Models Simulate Persona-Driven Decisions in Role-Playing?

Can Large Language Models substitute humans in making important decisions? Recent research has unveiled the potential of LLMs to role-play assigned personas, mimicking their knowledge and linguistic habits. However, imitative decision-making requires a more nuanced understanding of personas. In this paper, we benchmark the ability of LLMs in persona-driven decision-making. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can predict characters' decisions provided with the preceding stories in high-quality novels. Leveraging character analyses written by literary experts, we construct a dataset LIFECHOICE comprising 1,401 character decision points from 395 books. Then, we conduct comprehensive experiments on LIFECHOICE, with various LLMs and methods for LLM role-playing. The results demonstrate that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit promising capabilities in this task, yet there is substantial room for improvement. Hence, we further propose the CHARMAP method, which achieves a 6.01% increase in accuracy via persona-based memory retrieval. We will make our datasets and code publicly available.

SurveyAgent: A Conversational System for Personalized and Efficient Research Survey

In the rapidly advancing research fields such as AI, managing and staying abreast of the latest scientific literature has become a significant challenge for researchers. Although previous efforts have leveraged AI to assist with literature searches, paper recommendations, and question-answering, a comprehensive support system that addresses the holistic needs of researchers has been lacking. This paper introduces SurveyAgent, a novel conversational system designed to provide personalized and efficient research survey assistance to researchers. SurveyAgent integrates three key modules: Knowledge Management for organizing papers, Recommendation for discovering relevant literature, and Query Answering for engaging with content on a deeper level. This system stands out by offering a unified platform that supports researchers through various stages of their literature review process, facilitated by a conversational interface that prioritizes user interaction and personalization. Our evaluation demonstrates SurveyAgent's effectiveness in streamlining research activities, showcasing its capability to facilitate how researchers interact with scientific literature.