RoleBench
Models answer prompts while playing one of many fixed characters from films and books. Answers are compared with reference role answers by automatic text overlap.
Part of the RoleLLM paper. NVIDIA reports it without reasoning mode in the Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B card.
- Released
- October 2023
- Kind
- Overall chat quality
- Level
- Everyday
- Scored
- Checked automatically
- Answers
- Open-ended
- Tasks
- All public
- Last in a launch post
- October 2026
- Last model added
- October 2026
In the authors’ words
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing, which enhances user interactions by enabling models to imitate various characters. However, the closed-source nature of state-of-the-art LLMs and their general-purpose training limit role-playing optimization. In this paper, we introduce RoleLLM, a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in LLMs. RoleLLM comprises four stages: (1) Role Profile Construction for 100 roles; (2) Context-Based Instruction Generation (Context-Instruct) for role-specific knowledge extraction; (3) Role Prompting using GPT (RoleGPT) for speaking style imitation; and (4) Role-Conditioned Instruction Tuning (RoCIT) for fine-tuning open-source models along with role customization. By Context-Instruct and RoleGPT, we create RoleBench, the first systematic and fine-grained character-level benchmark dataset for role-playing with 168,093 samples. Moreover, RoCIT on RoleBench yields RoleLLaMA (English) and RoleGLM (Chinese), significantly enhancing role-playing abilities and even achieving comparable results with RoleGPT (using GPT-4).
Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B leads with 71.2
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
Source: Labs’ model cards
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B | 71.2 | Oct 2026 | Lab model card |
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Source: Labs’ model cards
One lab put it in a launch post in the last six months
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 23, 2026 | Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B | 71.2 | RoleBench (non-reasoning) |
One system card reports it
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 23, 2026 | Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B technical report | 71.2 | RoleBench Custom, win % vs Gemma4-E4B-it, released Q4_K_M imatrix checkpoint (Table 5). BF16 67.05 (Table 3) | Capabilities |
More in Instructions and chat
- IFEval In use Models answer about 500 prompts containing verifiable instructions such as word limits or required keywords. Code checks each instruction for strict and loose accuracy.
Gemma 4 31B IT 98.9% - IFBench In use 58 new out-of-domain verifiable output constraints. Scored by programmatic constraint checks (strict or loose). Nemotron-Cascade 2 30B-A3B 82.9%
- MultiChallenge In use Multi-turn conversations testing instruction retention, inference memory, versioned editing and self-coherence. Graded by LLM judge with rubrics. GPT-6.1 Sol 82%
- Multi-IF In use Models follow verifiable instructions over three-turn conversations in eight languages, extending IFEval. Scored by instruction accuracy at each turn. LFM3-1.7B 89.1%
- AdvancedIF In use Models respond to over 1,600 prompts with complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. A judge model checks each response against expert-written rubrics.
MAI-Thinking-1 85% - IFStruct In use Models generate JSON or YAML that must follow a requested schema and phrasing constraints, without constrained decoding. A response passes only if every structural constraint holds. Gemma 4 31B IT 95.9%