# Memory-Driven Role-Playing: Evaluation and Enhancement of Persona Knowledge Utilization in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19313/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05631/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs' Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17662/) (2025)
- [Emotional RAG: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Emotional Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23041/) (2024)
- [Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20968/) (2025)
- [Thinking in Character: Advancing Role-Playing Agents with Role-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01748/) (2025)
- [BEYOND DIALOGUE: A Profile-Dialogue Alignment Framework Towards General Role-Playing Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10903/) (2024)
- [KokoroChat: A Japanese Psychological Counseling Dialogue Dataset Collected via Role-Playing by Trained Counselors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01357/) (2025)
- [Spotting Out-of-Character Behavior: Atomic-Level Evaluation of Persona Fidelity in Open-Ended Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19352/) (2025)
- [MOOM: Maintenance, Organization and Optimization of Memory in Ultra-Long Role-Playing Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11860/) (2025)
- [RoleRAG: Enhancing LLM Role-Playing via Graph Guided Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18541/) (2025)
- [HyCoRA: Hyper-Contrastive Role-Adaptive Learning for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08017/) (2025)
- [Role-Playing Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13157/) (2025)
- [CATCH: A Novel Data Synthesis Framework for High Therapy Fidelity and Memory-Driven Planning Chain of Thought in AI Counseling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25733/) (2025)
- [DPRF: A Generalizable Dynamic Persona Refinement Framework for Optimizing Behavior Alignment Between Personalized LLM Role-Playing Agents and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14205/) (2025)
- [Talk Less, Call Right: Enhancing Role-Play LLM Agents with Automatic Prompt Optimization and Role Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00482/) (2025)
- [ORPP: Self-Optimizing Role-playing Prompts to Enhance Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02480/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PHASE-Tree: Modeling Character-State Evolution in Long-Horizon Role-Playing Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06975/) (2026)
- [The Situated Identity Test: Distinguishing Persistent Cognitive Identity from Persona Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22195/) (2026)
- [BOOKMARKS: Efficient Active Storyline Memory for Role-playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14169/) (2026)
- [Identity Is More Than Recall: A Benchmark for Persistent Identity in Deployed AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13637/) (2026)
- [PersMem: Internalizing Personality into Dual-Pathway Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34372/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A core challenge for faithful LLM role-playing is sustaining consistent characterization throughout long, open-ended dialogues, as models frequently fail to recall and accurately apply their designated persona knowledge without explicit cues. To tackle this, we propose the Memory-Driven Role-Playing paradigm. Inspired by Stanislavski's "emotional memory" acting theory, this paradigm frames persona knowledge as the LLM's internal memory store, requiring retrieval and application based solely on dialogue context, thereby providing a rigorous test of depth and autonomous use of knowledge. Centered on this paradigm, we contribute: (1) MREval, a fine-grained evaluation framework assessing four memory-driven abilities - Anchoring, Recalling, Bounding, and Enacting; (2) MRPrompt, a prompting architecture that guides structured memory retrieval and response generation; and (3) MRBench, a bilingual (Chinese/English) benchmark for fine-grained diagnosis. The novel paradigm provides a comprehensive diagnostic for four-staged role-playing abilities across 12 LLMs. Crucially, experiments show that MRPrompt allows small models (e.g., Qwen3-8B) to match the performance of much larger closed-source LLMs (e.g., Qwen3-Max and GLM-4.7), and confirms that upstream memory gains directly enhance downstream response quality, validating the staged theoretical foundation.