mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MOA: Multi-Objective Alignment for Role-Playing Agents

arXiv 2512.09756 ↗First posted 10 Dec 2025cs.CLcited by 5

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Abstract (arXiv)

Role-playing agents (RPAs) require balancing multiple objectives, such as instruction following, persona consistency, and stylistic fidelity, which are not always perfectly aligned across different dimensions. While prior work has primarily relied on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning with scalarized rewards, these approaches do not explicitly address the coordination of multiple reward dimensions during optimization. We present MOA (Multi-Objective Alignment), a reinforcement-learning framework that enables multi-dimensional, fine-grained rubric optimization for general RPAs. MOA introduces a novel multi-objective optimization strategy that trains simultaneously on multiple fine-grained rubrics to boost optimization performance. Additionally, to improve both output diversity and generation quality, we employ thought-augmented rollouts with off-policy guidance. Experiments on PersonaGym and RoleMRC show that MOA consistently improves multi-dimensional role-playing performance over supervised and standard RL baselines. Under identical evaluation protocols, an 8B model trained with MOA reaches performance competitive with strong closed-source models across multiple evaluation dimensions. These results suggest that MOA provides a practical framework for training more capable general-purpose role-playing agents.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2025.

Builds on

29 of 40 references.

References · 29

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 10,109
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  4. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  5. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,963
  6. 2019HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?cited by 4,100
  7. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
  8. 2015Trust Region Policy Optimizationcited by 2,580
  9. 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,848
  10. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspectivecited by 1,345
  11. 2025Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Datacited by 344
  12. 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playingcited by 339
17 more
  1. 2025Demystifying Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMscited by 326
  2. 2025Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidancecited by 281
  3. 2023On the Robustness of ChatGPT: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspectivecited by 211
  4. 2024Common 7B Language Models Already Possess Strong Math Capabilitiescited by 109
  5. 2024Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignmentcited by 104
  6. 2023Revisiting Out-of-distribution Robustness in NLP: Benchmark, Analysis, and LLMs Evaluationscited by 97
  7. 2024PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMscited by 97
  8. 2025CPPO: Accelerating the Training of Group Relative Policy Optimization-Based Reasoning Modelscited by 96
  9. 2024The Oscars of AI Theater: A Survey on Role-Playing with Language Modelscited by 48
  10. 2021NaturalConv: A Chinese Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-turn Topic-driven Conversationcited by 35
  11. 2025OpenCharacter: Training Customizable Role-Playing LLMs with Large-Scale Synthetic Personascited by 25
  12. 2025RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Followingcited by 18
  13. 2025Reasoning Does Not Necessarily Improve Role-Playing Abilitycited by 14
  14. 2025Thinking in Character: Advancing Role-Playing Agents with Role-Aware Reasoningcited by 14
  15. 2025RAIDEN-R1: Improving Role-awareness of LLMs via GRPO with Verifiable Rewardcited by 13
  16. 2024Exploring Forgetting in Large Language Model Pre-Trainingcited by 9
  17. 2025Entropy Regularizing Activation: Boosting Continuous Control, Large Language Models, and Image Classification with Activation as Entropy Constraintscited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026RoleCDE:Benchmarking and Mitigating Role-Alignment Trade-offs in Role-Playing Agents
  2. 2026Improving General Role-Playing Agents via Psychology-Grounded Reasoning and Role-Aware Policy Optimization
  3. 2025UC-MOA: Utility-Conditioned Multi-Objective Alignment for Distributional Pareto-Optimality
  4. 2026Adversarial Closed-Loop Curriculum for Evolving Role-Playing Agents
  5. 2025Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs' Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning
  6. 2026Forty Shades of Blue: Quality-Diversity Alignment via Mode-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2025CPO: Addressing Reward Ambiguity in Role-playing Dialogue via Comparative Policy Optimization
  8. 2025FURINA: A Fully Customizable Role-Playing Benchmark via Scalable Multi-Agent Collaboration Pipeline