From Facts to Insights: A Persona-Driven Dual Memory Framework and Dataset for Role-Playing Agents

Rongsheng Zhang, Ruofan Hu, Weijie Chen, Jiji Tang, Junnan Ren, Wanying Wu, Xunuoyan Chen, Tangjie Lv, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao


Abstract
While role-playing agents excel in short-term interactions, long-term conversations overwhelm context windows, motivating external memory frameworks. Current systems typically rely on persona-agnostic summarization, which records facts without persona-specific interpretation, yielding generic responses that compromise persona fidelity. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoleMemo, a dataset featuring four reasoning tasks where the factual fragments must be interpreted through the persona to reach the correct answer. Evaluation on RoleMemo exposes critical limitations of persona-agnostic frameworks. We thus propose DualMem, which decouples memory into two streams: factual cognition and persona-conditioned insight. Trained through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), our framework with a 4B-parameter model outperforms zero-shot persona-agnostic frameworks powered by DeepSeek-V3.2 for sustained persona fidelity. Our resources are available at https://github.com/Collab-Gen/RoleMemo.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.270
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
5666–5686
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.270/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rongsheng Zhang, Ruofan Hu, Weijie Chen, Jiji Tang, Junnan Ren, Wanying Wu, Xunuoyan Chen, Tangjie Lv, Tao Jin, and Zhou Zhao. 2026. From Facts to Insights: A Persona-Driven Dual Memory Framework and Dataset for Role-Playing Agents. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 5666–5686, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Facts to Insights: A Persona-Driven Dual Memory Framework and Dataset for Role-Playing Agents (Zhang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.270.pdf