# Staying In Character: Perspective-Bounded Memory For Book-Based Role-Playing Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25632 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25632/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 13 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [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)
- [OpenCharacter: Training Customizable Role-Playing LLMs with Large-Scale Synthetic Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15427/) (2025)
- [HoLLMwood: Unleashing the Creativity of Large Language Models in Screenwriting via Role Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11683/) (2024)
- [StoryWriter: A Multi-Agent Framework for Long Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16445/) (2025)
- [BookWorld: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Creative Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14538/) (2025)
- [ERABAL: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Boundary-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14710/) (2024)
- [Tell Me What You Don't Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16913/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [PersMem: Internalizing Personality into Dual-Pathway Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34372/) (2026)
- [The Curse of Knowledge in Role-Playing Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17327/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent LLM role-playing systems build character agents from novels by extracting characters, scenes, and relations. Yet long-narrative role-playing suffers from two failures: Factual Overreach, where shared retrieval or parametric memory lets a character use facts outside its perspective, and Stylistic Monotony, where profile descriptions flatten a character into a fixed voice. To address these failures, we propose REVERIEMEM, a three-layer memory architecture for book-based character agents. The episodic layer stores first-person scene memories; the semantic layer stores visibility-tagged facts; and the personality layer stores situation-dependent speech and behaviour patterns. For evaluation, we construct KBF-QA, a 4,386-question benchmark over eight novels for testing knowledge boundaries. REVERIEMEM improves Knowledge Boundary Fidelity by 34.6 percentage points over the strongest prior method. On BOOKWORLD's five-dimension pairwise narrative protocol, REVERIEMEM achieves a ~ 79% win rate, suggesting that perspective-bounded memory improves both boundary fidelity and character-grounded narrative generation.