mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ERABAL: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Boundary-Aware Learning

arXiv 2409.14710 ↗First posted 23 Sep 2024cs.CL cs.AIcited by 5

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate

Abstract (arXiv)

Role-playing is an emerging application in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), primarily implemented through the alignment training of a large language model (LLM) with assigned characters. Despite significant progress, role-playing agents (RPLAs) still struggle with maintaining role-consistency across conversations, particularly when confronted with boundary queries subtly related to character attributes. In this paper, we present ERABAL, a framework aimed at enhancing RPLAs' role-playing capabilities through boundary-aware learning. ERABAL encompasses a generation pipeline for role-specific dialogues and a concomitant methodology for alignment training. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate that ERABAL is both efficient and effective. By training with significantly fewer dialogues than those used in leading approaches, ERABAL achieves notable improvements across WikiRoleEval, CharacterEval, and the role-playing subset of MT-Bench compared to the generalist baseline models. Our code and datasets will be made publicly available to support further research.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 20 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2024.

Builds on

20 of 37 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents28 Apr
  2. 2024Neeko: Leveraging Dynamic LoRA for Efficient Multi-Character Role-Playing Agent21 Feb
  3. 2024CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluation2 Jan
  4. 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing16 Oct

Other references · 16

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  2. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
  3. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  4. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  5. 2017Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layercited by 3,413
  6. 2023Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Modelscited by 664
  7. 2023LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalizationcited by 425
  8. 2023OpenChat: Advancing Open-source Language Models with Mixed-Quality Datacited by 250
  9. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systemscited by 170
  10. 2020Editable Neural Networkscited by 154
  11. 2024Attacks, Defenses and Evaluations for LLM Conversation Safety: A Surveycited by 124
  12. 2024Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignmentcited by 104
4 more
  1. 2023CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Supportcited by 58
  2. 2023Do LLMs Possess a Personality? Making the MBTI Test an Amazing Evaluation for Large Language Modelscited by 54
  3. 2023Distilling Script Knowledge from Large Language Models for Constrained Language Planningcited by 45
  4. 2023Are Personalized Stochastic Parrots More Dangerous? Evaluating Persona Biases in Dialogue Systemscited by 37

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 2.

5 papers.

  1. 2025Towards a Design Guideline for RPA Evaluation: A Survey of Large Language Model-Based Role-Playing Agentscited by 22
  2. 2025RMTBench: Benchmarking LLMs Through Multi-Turn User-Centric Role-Playingcited by 10
  3. 2025The Rise of Darkness: Safety-Utility Trade-Offs in Role-Playing Dialogue Agentscited by 7
  4. 2026Staying In Character: Perspective-Bounded Memory For Book-Based Role-Playing Agentscited by 1
  5. 2026BOOKMARKS: Efficient Active Storyline Memory for Role-playingcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs' Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning
  2. 2024BEYOND DIALOGUE: A Profile-Dialogue Alignment Framework Towards General Role-Playing Language Model
  3. 2025RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following
  4. 2026Adversarial Closed-Loop Curriculum for Evolving Role-Playing Agents
  5. 2025Test-Time-Matching: Decouple Personality, Memory, and Linguistic Style in LLM-based Role-Playing Language Agent
  6. 2026Role-Playing Agents Driven by Large Language Models: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Trends
  7. 2026Character Beyond Speech: Leveraging Role-Playing Evaluation in Audio Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2026RoleCDE:Benchmarking and Mitigating Role-Alignment Trade-offs in Role-Playing Agents