MOA: Multi-Objective Alignment for Role-Playing Agents
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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
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- 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playingcited by 339
17 more
- 2025Demystifying Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMscited by 326
- 2025Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidancecited by 281
- 2023On the Robustness of ChatGPT: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspectivecited by 211
- 2024Common 7B Language Models Already Possess Strong Math Capabilitiescited by 109
- 2024Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignmentcited by 104
- 2023Revisiting Out-of-distribution Robustness in NLP: Benchmark, Analysis, and LLMs Evaluationscited by 97
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- 2025OpenCharacter: Training Customizable Role-Playing LLMs with Large-Scale Synthetic Personascited by 25
- 2025RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Followingcited by 18
- 2025Reasoning Does Not Necessarily Improve Role-Playing Abilitycited by 14
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- 2025RAIDEN-R1: Improving Role-awareness of LLMs via GRPO with Verifiable Rewardcited by 13
- 2024Exploring Forgetting in Large Language Model Pre-Trainingcited by 9
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 12
- 2026HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playingcited by 10
- 2026DREAM: LLM-based Dynamic Role-playing via Event-Aware Memory Graphcited by 2
- 2026CRPO: Character-centric Group Relative Policy Optimization for Role-aware Reasoning in Role-playing Agentscited by 0
- 2026TRACER: Trajectory-Aligned Learning for Multi-Turn User Simulationcited by 0
- 2026TRACER: Trajectory-Aligned Learning for Multi-Turn User Simulation23 Sep 2026
- 2026DREAM: LLM-based Dynamic Role-playing via Event-Aware Memory Graph27 May 2026
- 2026CRPO: Character-centric Group Relative Policy Optimization for Role-aware Reasoning in Role-playing Agents25 May 2026
- 2026MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents28 Feb 2026
- 2026HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing29 Jan 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026RoleCDE:Benchmarking and Mitigating Role-Alignment Trade-offs in Role-Playing Agents
- 2026Improving General Role-Playing Agents via Psychology-Grounded Reasoning and Role-Aware Policy Optimization
- 2025UC-MOA: Utility-Conditioned Multi-Objective Alignment for Distributional Pareto-Optimality
- 2026Adversarial Closed-Loop Curriculum for Evolving Role-Playing Agents
- 2025Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs' Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning
- 2026Forty Shades of Blue: Quality-Diversity Alignment via Mode-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
- 2025CPO: Addressing Reward Ambiguity in Role-playing Dialogue via Comparative Policy Optimization
- 2025FURINA: A Fully Customizable Role-Playing Benchmark via Scalable Multi-Agent Collaboration Pipeline