Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment

Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou


Abstract
Considerable efforts have been invested in augmenting the role-playing proficiency of open-source large language models (LLMs) by emulating proprietary counterparts. Nevertheless, we posit that LLMs inherently harbor role-play capabilities, owing to the extensive knowledge of characters and potential dialogues ingrained in their vast training corpora. Thus, we introduce Ditto, the first self-alignment method for role-play, which encourages an instruction-following LLM to simulate role-play dialogues as a variant of reading comprehension, and creates a role-play training set comprising 4000 characters, surpassing the scale of currently available datasets by tenfold regarding the number of roles. Subsequently, we fine-tune the LLM using this self-generated dataset to augment its role-playing capabilities. Upon evaluating our meticulously constructed role-play benchmark and the roleplay subset of MT-Bench, Ditto, in various parameter scales, consistently maintains a consistent role identity and provides accurate role-specific knowledge in multi-turn role-play conversations, outperforming all open-source role-play baselines. Furthermore, we present the first cross-supervision role-play experiment, revealing that the role-play styles can be easily acquired, while the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs confine the knowledge within role-play.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.423
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7828–7840
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.423
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.423
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Chang Zhou, and Jingren Zhou. 2024. Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7828–7840, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment (Lu et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.423.pdf