SimInter is a pipeline that enriches user profiles for conversational recommender systems by conducting synthetic interviews between two large language model agents, grounded in users’ statistical profiles and historical conversational evidence. An audit agent flags potential fabrication and stereotyping at each turn before enrichment. In experiments on movie recommendation, SimInter significantly increases the diversity of expressed preference aspects and improves simulator performance with two recommenders, with high human agreement on enriched attributes and auditor decisions.
arXiv:2607. 00010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are a core component of next-generation intelligent recommender systems because they enable users to actively elicit preferences, clarify intentions, and adapt recommendations in real time.
arXiv:2607. 27816v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Role-playing agents (RPAs) have become one of the most important consumer applications of large language models.
arXiv:2606. 02754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalization is a crucial capability of modern language agents.
arXiv:2606. 06614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite growing interest, most evaluations of large language models' (LLMs') personalization abilities have relied on synthetic data.
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) can evaluate explanations in recommender systems. It generates 18 explanation prototypes and has 14 LLMs rate them, comparing the results to human ratings from a user study. Findings show that while LLMs mimic human rating patterns and correlate moderately with human judgments, their absolute agreement is low and varies with model size and evaluation design, leading to four practical recommendations for using LLMs in this context.
The paper introduces Calibrated User Embeddings (CUE), a framework that encodes real user sessions into continuous representations and decodes them into persona commands to steer large language models (LLMs) as user simulators without additional training. CUE enables user-conditioned replay of past interactions and generates novel personas that better align with real-user success rates and failure patterns. Evaluations on the τ²‑Bench dataset show that CUE‑driven simulators commit fewer simulator‑attributed errors, more accurately reproduce real‑user failure modes, and maintain competitive user fidelity across various tasks and LLMs.
This reproducibility study confirms that incorporating generated natural‑language user profiles into recommender systems enhances transparency and allows users to directly intervene by correcting preferences or addressing cold‑start issues. The authors replicated the original findings and extended the evaluation with context ablation, multi‑seed stability tests, and mechanistic interpretability analysis using nnsight. Their results show that while perturbing profiles shifts predicted ratings uniformly across genres, the overall rankings remain unchanged, attributing this to the rating‑regression objective rather than the profile interface.
UXBench Pro is a new benchmark that evaluates personalized user experience in multi-turn dialogue interactions. It contains 1,000 test instances from real user interactions across 12 task scenarios and 82 domains, each paired with a FACTORS user profile describing seven behavioral facets. The benchmark introduces a dual-perspective evaluation: a personalized User Reward Model for third‑person judgment and Sim4Eval, a user simulator for first‑person evaluation across four cognitive state dimensions, along with meta‑benchmarks URMBench and USimBench to assess evaluator reliability.
The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) used as synthetic personas can predict real audience responses to marketing copy. Using thousands of headline A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, the authors compare a ten-persona panel grounded in real audience demographics to a no-persona zero‑shot baseline that asks the model for a typical reader’s click likelihood. Results show that the no‑persona baseline outperforms the persona‑based approach, with higher predictive validity and top‑1 accuracy, indicating that forcing the model to role‑play specific personas introduces bias and noise.
The study reproduces a prior work on recommender systems that use generated natural‑language user profiles to enhance transparency and user control. It confirms that the User Profile Recommendation (UPR) model performs competitively and that altering these profiles uniformly shifts predicted ratings without changing ranking order. Additional experiments include context ablation, multi‑seed stability, and mechanistic interpretability analysis with the nnsight framework.
GAUGE is a new offline protocol that evaluates whether the common practice of using an LLM-as-a-judge to rank task‑oriented agents actually aligns with a verifiable reward. Across 25 agents from six providers on two benchmarks, GAUGE finds that user satisfaction scores are largely uncorrelated with task success, and that the judge’s ranking loses precision when agents are closely matched in performance. The study highlights a gap between ranking validity and construct validity in current evaluation practices.
arXiv:2610.17895v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents are tasked with producing sophisticated interactive applications such as websites, desktop applications, and games. While humans assess...