In online games with diverse contents and frequent updates, newcomers first learn gameplay mechanics by community intelligence but soon face challenges that require real-time guidance from senior gamers. To provide easy access to such support, we introduce AMAN, Agent for Mentoring and Assisting Newbies in MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) - a companion chatbot designed to engage novice gamers. Our model functions as a human-like chat buddy that interacts with users in a friendly manner while providing substantive informational depth. In this light, we propose a multi-stage learning approach that incorporates continual pre-training with a sequence of online resources and instruction tuning on curated dialogues. To align with gamers’ specific needs, we first analyze user-oriented topics from online communities regarding a widely played MMORPG and construct a domain-specific dataset. Furthermore, we develop a multi-turn dialogue data to foster dynamic conversations with users. The evaluation result with the model trained upon publicly available language model shows our practical applicability on how conversational assistant in online games can help novice gamers.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown their capacity for generating natural dialogues, leveraging extensive pre-trained knowledge. However, the seamless integration of domain-specific knowledge into dialogue agents, without undermining their personas or unique textual style, remains a challenging task. Traditional approaches, such as constructing knowledge-aware character dialogue datasets or training LLMs from the ground up, require considerable resources. Sequentially fine-tuning character chatbots across multiple datasets or applying existing merging techniques often leads to catastrophic forgetting, resulting in the loss of both knowledge and the character’s distinct persona. This compromises the model’s ability to consistently generate character-driven dialogues within a user-centric framework. In this context, we introduce a novel model merging method, Chamain, which effortlessly enhances the performance of character models, much like finding a “free lunch”. Chamain merges domain-specific knowledge into a character model by parameter-wise weight combination of instruction-tuned models and learns to reflect persona’s unique characteristics and style through Layer-wise merging. Our experiments demonstrate that Chamain effectively maintains style while also solving domain-specific problems to a certain extent compared to the baselines, even showing a higher style probability compared to the character model in legal QA.