@inproceedings{cai-etal-2026-thinkpersona,
    title = "{T}hink{P}ersona: Thinking with Persona Graphs for Faithful Individualized Role-Playing",
    author = "Cai, Yichen  and
      Chen, Pei  and
      Li, Jiayang  and
      Guo, Jingya  and
      Li, Zejian  and
      Yang, Changyuan  and
      Sun, Lingyun",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.449/",
    pages = "9905--9927",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Large Language Models are increasingly utilized as Role-Playing Agents (RPAs) to simulate personas in interactive settings. However, current RPAs often produce flattened and stereotypical personas with limited depth and fidelity. This limitation arises from two core challenges: insufficient modeling of complex personal histories and internal logic, and ungrounded reasoning that fails to preserve persona coherence as dialogue context evolves. To address these challenges, we propose ThinkPersona, a role-playing agent trained to explicitly ground responses in individual identity. We introduce Persona Graphs as structured representations that encode life trajectories, values, relationships, and events as interconnected knowledge. We construct 1,201 Persona Graphs from real-world interviews and derive a Question{--}Reasoning{--}Answer (QRA) dataset of 23,401 samples that supervises reasoning over persona evidence. Fine-tuning on QRA enables ThinkPersona to internalize persona logic and generate persona-consistent responses in long-context dialogues. Experiments on three benchmarks show that ThinkPersona improves role-playing fidelity, behavioral consistency, and grounded reasoning over existing methods, while preserving general instruction-following capabilities. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Hualeez/ThinkPersona."
}