@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-actormind,
    title = "{A}ctor{M}ind: Emulating Human Actor Reasoning for Speech Role-Playing",
    author = "Chen, Xi  and
      Xue, Wei  and
      Guo, Yike",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1718/",
    pages = "34399--34413",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Role-playing has garnered rising attention as it provides a strong foundation for human-machine interaction and facilitates sociological research. However, current work is confined to textual modalities, neglecting speech, which plays a predominant role in daily life, thus limiting genuine role-playing. To bridge this gap, we conceptualize and benchmark speech role-playing through ActorMindBench, and we present a corresponding reasoning framework, called ActorMind. Specifically, (1) Speech Role-Playing enables models to deliver spontaneous responses with personalized verbal traits based on their role, the scene, and spoken dialogue. (2) ActorMindBench is a hierarchical benchmark comprises Utterance-Level content with 7,653 utterances, Scene-Level content with 313 scenes, and Role-Level content with 6 roles. (3) ActorMind is an off-the-shelf, multi-agent, chain-of-though style reasoning framework that emulates how human actors perform in theaters. Concretely, ActorMind first reads its assigned role description via Eye Agent, then comprehends emotional cues within contextual spoken dialogues through Ear Agent. Subsequently, Brain Agent generates a descriptive emotional state, and finally, Mouth Agent delivers the scripts infused with corresponding emotion state. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ActorMind in enhancing speech role-playing. The project page is available at https://github.com/OzymandiasChen/ActorMind."
}