Enhancing Persona Following at Decoding Time via Dynamic Importance Estimation for Role-Playing Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01438v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 04:37:16 GMT
• Title: Enhancing Persona Following at Decoding Time via Dynamic Importance Estimation for Role-Playing Agents
• Authors: Yuxin Liu, Mingye Zhu, Siyuan Liu, Bo Hu, Lei Zhang,
• Abstract summary: The utility of Role-Playing Language Agents in sociological research is growing alongside the adoption of Large Language Models.<n>For realism in social simulation, Role-Playing Language Agents must adhere to their personas defined by character profiles.<n>We propose a novel, theory-driven method that dynamically estimates context-dependent persona importance and integrates it into weighted reward-guided decoding.
• Score: 13.003892350610947
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The utility of Role-Playing Language Agents in sociological research is growing alongside the adoption of Large Language Models. For realism in social simulation, these agents must adhere to their personas defined by character profiles, yet existing strategies-static prompt engineering or costly fine-tuning-fail to adapt personas to dynamic scenarios. Psychological theories, such as the Cognitive-Affective Personality Systems, provide a crucial explanation for this failure: a persona's influence on behavior is not static but varies with the scenarios. This context-dependence highlights the critical need for adaptive persona management. To address this gap, we propose a novel, theory-driven method that dynamically estimates context-dependent persona importance and integrates it into weighted reward-guided decoding, enabling inference-time persona following. Specifically, we introduce the Persona Dynamic Decoding (PDD) framework, which consists of two key components: (1) Persona Importance Estimation (PIE) module, which dynamically quantifies the contextual importance of persona attributes without requiring ground-truth supervision; and (2) Persona-Guided Inference-Time Alignment (PIA) paradigm, which leverages these importance scores to construct weighted multi-objective rewards and modulate generation probabilities during inference. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method in utterance consistency and behavioral fidelity.

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