# Test-Time-Matching: Decouple Personality, Memory, and Linguistic Style in LLM-based Role-Playing Language Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16799/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 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 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Toward Controlled Generation of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00955/) (2017)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17976/) (2023)
- [CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01275/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12474/) (2024)
- [Style Transformer: Unpaired Text Style Transfer without Disentangled Latent Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05621/) (2019)
- [CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10278/) (2023)
- [Neeko: Leveraging Dynamic LoRA for Efficient Multi-Character Role-Playing Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13717/) (2024)
- [In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04338/) (2025)
- [IBSEN: Director-Actor Agent Collaboration for Controllable and Interactive Drama Script Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01093/) (2024)
- [Emotional RAG: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Emotional Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23041/) (2024)
- [CoSER: A Comprehensive Literary Dataset and Framework for Training and Evaluating LLM Role-Playing and Persona Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09082/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Content Preservation in Text Style Transfer Using Reverse Attention and Conditional Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00449/) (2021)
- [A Review of Text Style Transfer using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15144/) (2021)
- [Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17962/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Text Style Transfer via LLMs and Attention Masking with Multi-way Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13647/) (2024)
- [StyleChat: Learning Recitation-Augmented Memory in LLMs for Stylized Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11439/) (2024)
- [Thinking Before Speaking: A Role-playing Model with Mindset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13752/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Can Large Language Models Simulate Human Cognition Beyond Behavioral Imitation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27694/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled role-playing language agents to demonstrate significant potential in various applications. However, relying solely on prompts and contextual inputs often proves insufficient for achieving deep immersion in specific roles, particularly well-known fictional or public figures. On the other hand, fine-tuning-based approaches face limitations due to the challenges associated with data collection and the computational resources required for training, thereby restricting their broader applicability. To address these issues, we propose Test-Time-Matching (TTM), a training-free role-playing framework through test-time scaling and context engineering. TTM uses LLM agents to automatically decouple a character's features into personality, memory, and linguistic style. Our framework involves a structured, three-stage generation pipeline that utilizes these features for controlled role-playing. It achieves high-fidelity role-playing performance, also enables seamless combinations across diverse linguistic styles and even variations in personality and memory. We evaluate our framework through human assessment, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves the outstanding performance in generating expressive and stylistically consistent character dialogues.