CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards

Abstract: Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs) have emerged as a significant application direction for LLMs. Existing approaches typically rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to enable models to imitate character behaviors in specific scenarios, but often neglect the underlying \emph{cognitive} mechanisms driving these behaviors. Inspired by cognitive psychology, we introduce \textbf{CogDual}, a novel RPLA adopting a \textit{cognize-then-respond } reasoning paradigm. By jointly modeling external situational awareness and internal self-awareness, CogDual generates responses with improved character consistency and contextual alignment. To further optimize the performance, we employ reinforcement learning with two general-purpose reward schemes designed for open-domain text generation. Extensive experiments on the CoSER benchmark, as well as Cross-MR and LifeChoice, demonstrate that CogDual consistently outperforms existing baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks.