RoleRAG: Enhancing LLM Role-Playing via Graph Guided Retrieval

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in character imitation, enabling immersive and engaging conversations. However, they often generate content that is irrelevant or inconsistent with a character's background. We attribute these failures to: (1) the inability to accurately recall character-specific knowledge due to entity ambiguity, and (2) a lack of awareness of the character's cognitive boundaries. To address these issues, we propose RoleRAG, a retrieval-based framework that integrates efficient entity disambiguation for knowledge indexing with a boundary-aware retriever for extracting contextually appropriate information from a structured knowledge graph. Experiments on role-playing benchmarks show that RoleRAG's calibrated retrieval helps both general-purpose and role-specific LLMs better align with character knowledge and reduce hallucinated responses.