Existing Role-Playing Agents (RPAs), powered by large language models, are predominantly evaluated on static, text-only, dyadic conversations, which inadequately reflect the complexity of realistic human interactions involving multiple interlocutors and multi-modal communication. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniCharacter++, the first benchmark for evaluating multi-character interactions in a joint text-speech context. Specifically, OmniCharacter++ contributes: (1) a large-scale dataset comprising 10,287 characters, 118,017 multi-turn dialogues, and over one million audio responses across 8 open-world topics and 31 subfields, covering diverse multi-modal role-playing scenarios; (2) a comprehensive evaluation suite for dialogue understanding, generation quality, and perceptual naturalness; and (3) UniCharacter-7B, a unified text-speech model trained on this dataset to manage complex multi-character dynamics, ensuring both role-specific vocal fidelity and cross-participant semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that UniCharacter-7B achieves more realistic and consistent role-playing responses in terms of both attractiveness and consistency, while also highlighting that OmniCharacter++ poses substantial challenges for state-of-the-art models, charting a clear path for future research.

OmniCharacter++: Toward Comprehensive Benchmark for Realistic Role-Playing Agents / Zhang, H., Zeng, P., Zhang, J.i., Song, J., Sebe, N., Shen, H.T., Gao, L.. - In: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE. - ISSN 0162-8828. - 48:9(2026), pp. 10958-10975. [10.1109/tpami.2026.3690447]

OmniCharacter++: Toward Comprehensive Benchmark for Realistic Role-Playing Agents

Song, Jingkuan;Sebe, Nicu;
2026-01-01

Abstract

Existing Role-Playing Agents (RPAs), powered by large language models, are predominantly evaluated on static, text-only, dyadic conversations, which inadequately reflect the complexity of realistic human interactions involving multiple interlocutors and multi-modal communication. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniCharacter++, the first benchmark for evaluating multi-character interactions in a joint text-speech context. Specifically, OmniCharacter++ contributes: (1) a large-scale dataset comprising 10,287 characters, 118,017 multi-turn dialogues, and over one million audio responses across 8 open-world topics and 31 subfields, covering diverse multi-modal role-playing scenarios; (2) a comprehensive evaluation suite for dialogue understanding, generation quality, and perceptual naturalness; and (3) UniCharacter-7B, a unified text-speech model trained on this dataset to manage complex multi-character dynamics, ensuring both role-specific vocal fidelity and cross-participant semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that UniCharacter-7B achieves more realistic and consistent role-playing responses in terms of both attractiveness and consistency, while also highlighting that OmniCharacter++ poses substantial challenges for state-of-the-art models, charting a clear path for future research.
2026
9
Zhang, Haonan; Zeng, Pengpeng; Zhang, Ji; Song, Jingkuan; Sebe, Nicu; Shen, Heng Tao; Gao, Lianli
OmniCharacter++: Toward Comprehensive Benchmark for Realistic Role-Playing Agents / Zhang, H., Zeng, P., Zhang, J.i., Song, J., Sebe, N., Shen, H.T., Gao, L.. - In: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE. - ISSN 0162-8828. - 48:9(2026), pp. 10958-10975. [10.1109/tpami.2026.3690447]
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/497691
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