# ActorMind: Emulating Human Actor Reasoning for Speech Role-Playing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11103 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11103/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [YourTTS: Towards Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS and Zero-Shot Voice Conversion for everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02418/) (2021)
- [FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17685/) (2025)
- [Evaluation and Benchmarking of LLM Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21504/) (2025)
- [VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05370/) (2024)
- [Spark-TTS: An Efficient LLM-Based Text-to-Speech Model with Single-Stream Decoupled Speech Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01710/) (2025)
- [MAGMA: A Multi-Graph based Agentic Memory Architecture for AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03236/) (2026)
- [M2IV: Towards Efficient and Fine-grained Multimodal In-Context Learning via Representation Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04633/) (2025)
- [Logical Phase Transitions: Understanding Collapse in LLM Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02902/) (2026)
- [EvoTool: Self-Evolving Tool-Use Policy Optimization in LLM Agents via Blame-Aware Mutation and Diversity-Aware Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04900/) (2026)
- [SCRIBE: Structured Mid-Level Supervision for Tool-Using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03555/) (2026)
- [ToolTree: Efficient LLM Agent Tool Planning via Dual-Feedback Monte Carlo Tree Search and Bidirectional Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12740/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models Meet Harry Potter: A Bilingual Dataset for Aligning Dialogue Agents with Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06869/) (2022)
- [SOTOPIA-Omega: Dynamic Strategy Injection Learning and Social Instruction Following Evaluation for Social Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15538/) (2025)
- [AdaMCoT: Rethinking Cross-Lingual Factual Reasoning through Adaptive Multilingual Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16154/) (2025)
- [Understanding LLM Reasoning for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03503/) (2025)
- [LoRA-MGPO: Mitigating Double Descent in Low-Rank Adaptation via Momentum-Guided Perturbation Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14538/) (2025)
- [Revealing and Mitigating the Challenge of Detecting Character Knowledge Errors in LLM Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11726/) (2024)
- [CCL-XCoT: An Efficient Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Method for Mitigating Hallucination Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14239/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BV-Blend: Uncertainty-Weighted Historical Baselines for Stable Critic-Free RL with Verifiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28707/) (2026)
- [UniSAE: Unified Speech Attribute Editing on Speaker, Emotion and Low-Level Content via Discrete Phonetic Posteriorgram Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31128/) (2026)
- [RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16614/) (2026)
- [COT-TTS: Audio Context-Aware Text-to-Speech with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22697/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Role-playing has garnered rising attention as it provides a strong foundation for human-machine interaction and facilitates sociological research. However, current work is confined to textual modalities, neglecting speech, which plays a predominant role in daily life, thus limiting genuine role-playing. To bridge this gap, we conceptualize and benchmark speech role-playing through ActorMindBench, and we present a corresponding reasoning framework, called ActorMind. Specifically, (1) Speech Role-Playing enables models to deliver spontaneous responses with personalized verbal traits based on their role, the scene, and spoken dialogue. (2) ActorMindBench is a hierarchical benchmark comprises Utterance-Level content with 7,653 utterances, Scene-Level content with 313 scenes, and Role-Level content with 6 roles. (3) ActorMind is an off-the-shelf, multi-agent, chain-of-though style reasoning framework that emulates how human actors perform in theaters. Concretely, ActorMind first reads its assigned role description via Eye Agent, then comprehends emotional cues within contextual spoken dialogues through Ear Agent. Subsequently, Brain Agent generates a descriptive emotional state, and finally, Mouth Agent delivers the scripts infused with corresponding emotion state. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ActorMind in enhancing speech role-playing.