arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

CUEing User Simulators: Calibrated User Embeddings for Multi-Turn Benchmarking

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 Computation and Language
Aug 31

PersonaForge: Realistic Multi-Turn User Simulation for Agentic Systems

PersonaForge is a user‑simulation framework that generates realistic multi‑turn interactions between users and agentic systems, addressing the gap that most training data assumes single‑turn queries. It uses a four‑dimensional persona space, SOUL‑driven behavioral control calibrated to real‑user statistics, and Reverse Deep Construction from authentic seed queries to create a 6.3K‑record training set and a 138‑task benchmark called PersonaForge‑Bench across 20 professional domains. Experiments with Qwen3.5‑27B show that training with PersonaForge improves composite scores by 4.1%, especially in Task Completion (+6.0%) and Response Quality (+6.8%), while also reducing turns and tool calls, indicating more efficient interactions.

By Hanglong Lv, Dawei Zhu, Lei Li, Bowen Ye, Huaqiu Liu, Yifan Song, Bofei Gao, Weimin Xiong, Jinhao Dong, Chenhong He, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tong Yang, Fuli Luo
arXiv AI
Sep 10

A Three-Tier Persona Vector for Controllable User Simulation in Agentic Evaluation

The paper introduces a three-tier persona vector for user simulation in evaluating LLM agents, comprising 23 dimensions across demographics, behavioral traits, and emotional states, plus a query-complexity overlay. It demonstrates that these nuanced personas generate diverse, scenario-reactive conversations, leading to significant variations in agent goal achievement and compliance across different contexts. The model’s design allows for reproducible, auditable user behavior patterns without relying on learned covariance matrices.

By Rahul Khedar, Eshita, Sneha Teja Sree Reddy Thondapu, Mayank Malhotra, Arup Kumar Das, Jitesh Chandra Mishra, Arun Menon, Avinash Karn, Mouli V