# MERRY: Semantically Decoupled Evaluation of Multimodal Emotional and Role Consistencies of Role-Playing Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21941 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21941/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 29 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2026.

## 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, 29 of 29)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Seed1.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07062/) (2025)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17976/) (2023)
- [RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00746/) (2023)
- [CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01275/) (2024)
- [ChatHaruhi: Reviving Anime Character in Reality via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09597/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09708/) (2020)
- [M3ED: Multi-modal Multi-scene Multi-label Emotional Dialogue Database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10237/) (2022)
- [SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13679/) (2024)
- [From Role-Play to Drama-Interaction: An LLM Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14231/) (2024)
- [CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05631/) (2024)
- [CPED: A Large-Scale Chinese Personalized and Emotional Dialogue Dataset for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14727/) (2022)
- [PromptTTS++: Controlling Speaker Identity in Prompt-Based Text-to-Speech Using Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08140/) (2023)
- [Towards Multimodal Emotional Support Conversation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03650/) (2024)
- [TimeChara: Evaluating Point-in-Time Character Hallucination of Role-Playing Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18027/) (2024)
- [MMRole: A Comprehensive Framework for Developing and Evaluating Multimodal Role-Playing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04203/) (2024)
- [Towards Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation: A Rich Text-Speech-Vision Avatar-based Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04976/) (2025)
- [Generative Expressive Conversational Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21491/) (2024)
- [Emotion and Intent Joint Understanding in Multimodal Conversation: A Benchmarking Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02751/) (2024)
- [OmniCharacter: Towards Immersive Role-Playing Agents with Seamless Speech-Language Personality Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20277/) (2025)
- [BEYOND DIALOGUE: A Profile-Dialogue Alignment Framework Towards General Role-Playing Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10903/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Role-Playing Agents (MRPAs) are attracting increasing attention due to their ability to deliver more immersive multimodal emotional interactions. However, existing studies still rely on pure textual benchmarks to evaluate the text responses of MRPAs, while delegating the assessment of their multimodal expressions solely to modality-synthesis metrics. This evaluation paradigm, on the one hand, entangles semantic assessment with modality generation, leading to ambiguous error attribution, and on the other hand remains constrained by the heavy reliance on human judgment. To this end, we propose MERRY, a semantically decoupled evaluation framework for assessing Multimodal Emotional and Role consistencies of Role-playing agents. This framework introduce five refined metrics for EC and three for RC. Notably, we transform the traditional subjective scoring approach into a novel bidirectional-evidence-finding task, significantly improving the human agreement of LLM-as-Judge evaluations. Based on MERRY, we conduct extensive evaluations. Our empirical results primarily reveal that: (1) Training on synthetic datasets tends to reduce emotional consistency, whereas training on real-world datasets improves it; (2) Existing models suffer from emotional templatization and simplification, exhibiting positive-bias and performance bottleneck in fine-grained negative emotions; (3) Simple prompting method strengthens the weak models but constrains the strong ones, while simple fine-tuning method suffers from poor role generalization. Codes and dataset are available.