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
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:2610.31512v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Users increasingly rely on AI systems for extended, multi-turn tasks, yet evidence indicates that LLM-based system performance degrades over prolonged...
By Mustafa Omer Gul, Philippe Laban, Tanya Goyal, Jennifer Neville
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.
By Anjali Kantharuban, Jonas Mueller
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.
By Yuhang Zhu, Mingxuan Du, Benfeng Xu, Jie Gao, Lingyun Yu, Hongtao Xie
arXiv:2605.12894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in settings where they interact with diverse users, including those who are uncle...
By Harshita Chopra, Kshitish Ghate, Aylin Caliskan, Tadayoshi Kohno, Chirag Shah, Natasha Jaques
arXiv:2609.15972v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As language models become more capable, long-term collaboration in learning, reasoning, and decision-making calls for a deeper understanding of the p...
By Zixuan Wang, Yufan Zhou, Jinzhou Tang, Xinle Yu, Chengjun Wu, Lyumanshan Ye, Zhaoxiang Feng, Letian Peng, Adyasha Patra, Fan Bai, Enze Ma, Zhengding Hu, Jianyang Gu, Zhao Wang, Yufei Ding, Jingbo Shang, Tianmin Shu, Zhiting Hu, Zhen Wang
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: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:2610.09163v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Task-oriented conversational agents remain fragile under real world conversation scenarios as they rarely follow a predictable script, especially when...
By Arkajyoti Chakraborty, Aryan Tayal, Ishika Agarwal, Tanner Sorensen, Justin Chiu, Alessandro Di Bari, Neha Gupta, Andreas Stolcke
The paper introduces TRACER, a multi‑turn user simulator that models evolving user intent and aligns simulated behavior with real interaction trajectories. TRACER is trained first with supervised fine‑tuning on real dialogues and then with reinforcement learning that uses hierarchical outcome‑ and trajectory‑level rewards to address reward sparsity and credit assignment. In real customer‑service sessions, TRACER‑7B outperforms the best baseline by 11.4 conversion F1, achieves the lowest group‑level conversion‑rate error and semantic trajectory distance, and generalizes to out‑of‑distribution scenarios, while human Turing tests show its conversations appear natural. The authors also present the Dynamic Marketing Benchmark, which evaluates both persuasion effectiveness and response quality of large language models through simulated interactions, demonstrating that higher response quality does not always lead to higher conversion rates.
By Geng Chen, Ruotong Pan, Zhirui Yang, Qiqi He, Jiawei Chen, Zhang Yunfei, Chongyuan Chen, Minxuan Lv, Zheng Yang, Win-Bin Huang, Xiangyu Wu, Wenwu Ou
arXiv:2605. 28882v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models, evaluating human-likeness in open-ended conversation has become increasingly important.
By Yihang Lin, Yunze Gao, Zeyang Lin, Dongbo Li, Kun Peng, Yue Liu