arXiv Computation and Language

SIC-Agents: Benchmarking and Building an Adaptive Simulator for Pediatric Serious Illness Communication Training

The paper introduces SIC-Agents, a self‑improving framework designed to enhance simulation for pediatric serious illness communication (SIC) training. It presents two new benchmark suites—PitfallBench and DialogueBench—that assess simulators at both turn‑level and full‑dialogue levels, specifically addressing the unique challenges of multi‑party interactions and parental distress. Experiments demonstrate that SIC‑Agents surpasses static expert prompting, and the authors release the benchmarks for broader research use.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

MADS: Multi-Agent Dialog Simulation for Robust Conversational Agents

MADS (Multi-Agent Dialog Simulation) is a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates structured, diverse dialogue trajectories, including adversarial conversations that reflect realistic failure scenarios. The resulting MADS-Bench benchmark covers six domains, 55 personas, and 1095 conversations, with about 66% featuring failure-prone situations. Models trained with MADS are evaluated using a two-stage approach combining supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to assess robustness.

By Arkajyoti Chakraborty, Adam Zernik, Ishika Kulkarni, Mudit Arora, Hugo Lin, Justin Chiu, Alessandro Di Bari, Neha Gupta, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Training User Simulators with Latent Intrinsic Feedback

The paper introduces user simulators that provide intrinsic feedback by incorporating latent evaluation states such as internal thoughts, reactions, and scalar ratings. These simulators, trained on real user–assistant interaction logs, outperform prompted baselines in realism and critiquing behaviors, and their turn‑level evaluations better align with human judgments. Additionally, the intrinsic feedback serves as an effective reward signal for multi‑turn reinforcement learning, reducing compute requirements by over 50% compared to setups using external judge LLMs.

By Tarek Naous, Craig Boutilier, Wei Xu, Ofer Meshi
arXiv AI
Oct 9

MIMESIS: Learning User Simulators as Training Environments for Interactive Agents

MIMESIS is a user simulator designed to train interactive language agents by mimicking real user behavior. It is trained on human conversations with explicit reasoning supervision and incorporates 13 realistic behavioral patterns. Experiments show that agents trained with MIMESIS outperform those trained with GPT-5.5 across multiple unseen simulators, and the proposed Coached On-Policy Self-Distillation further improves agent performance by providing dense, token-level supervision.

By Hoang Phan, Dat Huynh, Andrey Zhmoginov, Qi Zeng, Wancen Mu, Yue Cao, Shengjie Bi, Yun He, Changdae Oh, Deren Lei
arXiv AI
Jul 10

SimRPD: Optimizing Recruitment Proactive Dialogue Agents through Simulator-Based Data Evaluation and Selection

arXiv:2601. 02871v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task-oriented proactive dialogue agents play a pivotal role in recruitment, particularly for steering conversations towards specific business outcomes, such as acquiring social-media contacts for private-channel conversion.

By Zhiyong Cao, Dunqiang Liu, Qi Dai, Haojun Xu, Huai Yuen Khor, Hao Wang, Huan He, Yafei Liu, Ke Ma, Ruqian Shi, Sicheng Zhou, Sijia Yao
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

MindEval2: Clinically Grounded Patients and Rubrics for Evaluating Language Models in Mental Health Support

MindEval2 is a new evaluation framework for AI chatbots in mental health support, comprising Mental Health Quality Rubrics (MHQR) and the MindSim patient simulation harness. MHQR, developed with PhD-level psychologists, provides explicit, actionable criteria for assessing response quality, while MindSim offers realistic, longitudinal patient interactions with a memory component. The study evaluated 18 models, finding that although surface-level quality has improved, guidance calibration remains the main failure across all models.

By John Mendon\c{c}a, Daniel Tschernutter, Jos\'e Pombal, Areti Vassilopoulos, Catarina Botelho, Ignacio Sarasua, Maya D'Eon, Nuno Guerreiro, Ricardo Rei