mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profiles

arXiv 2502.18968 ↗First posted 26 Feb 2025cs.CLcited by 41

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Abstract (arXiv)

User simulators are crucial for replicating human interactions with dialogue systems, supporting both collaborative training and automatic evaluation, especially for large language models (LLMs). However, current role-playing methods face challenges such as a lack of utterance-level authenticity and user-level diversity, often hindered by role confusion and dependence on predefined profiles of well-known figures. In contrast, direct simulation focuses solely on text, neglecting implicit user traits like personality and conversation-level consistency. To address these issues, we introduce the User Simulator with Implicit Profiles (USP), a framework that infers implicit user profiles from human-machine interactions to simulate personalized and realistic dialogues. We first develop an LLM-driven extractor with a comprehensive profile schema, then refine the simulation using conditional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency, optimizing at both the utterance and conversation levels. Finally, a diverse profile sampler captures the distribution of real-world user profiles. Experimental results show that USP outperforms strong baselines in terms of authenticity and diversity while maintaining comparable consistency. Additionally, using USP to evaluate LLM on dynamic multi-turn aligns well with mainstream benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.

Key facts. Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 41 of its 64 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2025.

Builds on

41 of 64 references.

References · 41

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
  4. 2018UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reductioncited by 2,898
  5. 2021SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddingscited by 2,173
  6. 2020Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hyperspherecited by 1,405
  7. 2023FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generationcited by 1,282
  8. 2024Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preferencecited by 1,184
  9. 2023Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversationscited by 839
  10. 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agentscited by 830
  11. 2018Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?cited by 828
  12. 2023LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Datasetcited by 461
29 more
  1. 2023Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playingcited by 339
  2. 2024MT-Bench-101: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialoguescited by 250
  3. 2024Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalizationcited by 208
  4. 2019The Second Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI2)cited by 179
  5. 2024CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluationcited by 143
  6. 2024Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignmentcited by 104
  7. 2022Same Author or Just Same Topic? Towards Content-Independent Style Representationscited by 86
  8. 2019Personalizing Dialogue Agents via Meta-Learningcited by 83
  9. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 77
  10. 2019Exploiting Persona Information for Diverse Generation of Conversational Responsescited by 58
  11. 2024Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstoriescited by 51
  12. 2024Evaluating Large Language Models as Generative User Simulators for Conversational Recommendationcited by 48
  13. 2023Faithful Persona-based Conversational Dataset Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 47
  14. 2019How to Build User Simulators to Train RL-based Dialog Systemscited by 46
  15. 2018Neural User Simulation for Corpus-based Policy Optimisation for Spoken Dialogue Systemscited by 42
  16. 2016A Sequence-to-Sequence Model for User Simulation in Spoken Dialogue Systemscited by 39
  17. 2024Beyond Demographics: Aligning Role-playing LLM-based Agents Using Human Belief Networkscited by 39
  18. 2024ElectionSim: Massive Population Election Simulation Powered by Large Language Model Driven Agentscited by 35
  19. 2023PlatoLM: Teaching LLMs in Multi-Round Dialogue via a User Simulatorcited by 29
  20. 2020Multi-Agent Task-Oriented Dialog Policy Learning with Role-Aware Reward Decompositioncited by 23
  21. 2024Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulationcited by 21
  22. 2023An In-depth Investigation of User Response Simulation for Conversational Searchcited by 20
  23. 2024Beyond Binary: Towards Fine-Grained LLM-Generated Text Detection via Role Recognition and Involvement Measurementcited by 17
  24. 2023Is ChatGPT Involved in Texts? Measure the Polish Ratio to Detect ChatGPT-Generated Textcited by 15
  25. 2024BEYOND DIALOGUE: A Profile-Dialogue Alignment Framework Towards General Role-Playing Language Modelcited by 13
  26. 2024"In Dialogues We Learn": Towards Personalized Dialogue Without Pre-defined Profiles through In-Dialogue Learningcited by 10
  27. 2024Role-Play Zero-Shot Prompting with Large Language Models for Open-Domain Human-Machine Conversationcited by 7
  28. 2024Multi-trait User Simulation with Adaptive Decoding for Conversational Task Assistantscited by 5
  29. 2024SHARP: Unlocking Interactive Hallucination via Stance Transfer in Role-Playing LLMscited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 33.

41 papers.

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  1. 2025Flipping the Dialogue: Training and Evaluating User Language Modelscited by 58
  2. 2026HumanLM: Simulating Users with State Alignment Beats Response Imitationcited by 37
  3. 2026RealUserSim: Bridging the Reality Gap in Agent Benchmarking via Grounded User Simulationcited by 12
  4. 2026Quantifying the Utility of User Simulators for Building Collaborative LLM Assistantscited by 10
  5. 2026Beyond Cooperative Simulators: Generating Realistic User Personas for Robust Evaluation of LLM Agentscited by 10
  6. 2026MirrorBench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Conversational User-Proxy Agents for Human-Likenesscited by 7
  7. 2026MatrAIx: Simulating the World with 8.3 Billion Persona Agentscited by 7
  8. 2025SAGE: A Top-Down Bottom-Up Knowledge-Grounded User Simulator for Multi-turn AGent Evaluationcited by 6
  9. 2026DiscoverLLM: From Executing Intents to Discovering Themcited by 6
  10. 2026Sell More, Play Less: Benchmarking LLM Realistic Selling Skillcited by 3
  11. 2025LLM-Driven Preference Data Synthesis for Proactive Prediction of the Next User Utterance in Human-Machine Dialoguecited by 2
  12. 2025TWICE: Modeling the Temporal Evolution of Personalized User Behavior via Event-Driven Agentscited by 2
29 more
  1. 2026MUSE: Multi-Domain Chinese User Simulation via Self-Evolving Profiles and Rubric-Guided Alignmentcited by 2
  2. 2026Structuring the Space of Sociotechnical Alignmentcited by 2
  3. 2026How to Train a Real-World Silicon Concierge? Internalizing Complex Business Workflow to Only OneModelcited by 2
  4. 2025Synthia: Scalable Grounded Persona Generation from Social Media Datacited by 1
  5. 2025StaffPro: an LLM Agent for Joint Staffing and Profilingcited by 1
  6. 2025Flexible Agent Alignment with Goal Inference from Open-Ended Dialogcited by 1
  7. 2026HAG: Hierarchical Demographic Tree-based Agent Generation for Topic-Adaptive Simulationcited by 1
  8. 2026Controllable User Simulationcited by 1
  9. 2026Beyond Ideal Instruction: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating LLMs in Realistic Interactionscited by 1
  10. 2026Long-Term Simulation Exposes Cognitive-Developmental Risks in AI Companionscited by 1
  11. 2026ShiJianBench: From Dialogue to Decision for Long-Horizon Evaluation of Investment Advisorscited by 1
  12. 2026Intent Speaks Louder: Controllable User Simulation Beyond Response Imitationcited by 1
  13. 2026KnowSim: Evaluating Information Calibration in LLM Assistants with User Simulators that Learncited by 1
  14. 2025From Simulation to Strategy: Automating Personalized Interaction Planning for Conversational Agentscited by 0
  15. 2026SimRPD: Optimizing Recruitment Proactive Dialogue Agents through Simulator-Based Data Evaluation and Selectioncited by 0
  16. 2026From Feelings to Metrics: Understanding and Formalizing How Users Vibe-Test LLMscited by 0
  17. 2026Beyond Individual Personas: Aligning Synthetic Dialogue to Population-Level Behavior Distributionscited by 0
  18. 2026Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agentscited by 0
  19. 2026LLM Consumer Behavior Theory: Foundations of a Novel Research Fieldcited by 0
  20. 2026Beyond Borrowed Histories: Person-Aligned User Simulation for Interactive Role-Playing Evaluationcited by 0
  21. 2026Ask or Answer: A Decision Framework for Multi-Turn Health Misinformation Interventioncited by 0
  22. 2026LiveSim: Simulating Environment-Shaped Users in Multi-Agent Live-Stream Ecosystemscited by 0
  23. 2026"Act Like a 5th Grader" is Not Enough: Bounding Knowledge in LLM-Based User Simulatorscited by 0
  24. 2026TRACER: Trajectory-Aligned Learning for Multi-Turn User Simulationcited by 0
  25. 2026Proactive Dialogue Policy Optimization via Cognitive-State Transitioncited by 0
  26. 2026AnthroDial: Benchmarking LLM Anthropomorphism in Autonomous Social Interactioncited by 0
  27. 2026CUEing User Simulators: Calibrated User Embeddings for Multi-Turn Benchmarkingcited by 0
  28. 2026Dataset Signatures in Human-LLM Interactions and User Modelingcited by 0
  29. 2026Training User Simulators with Latent Intrinsic Feedbackcited by 0

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  1. 2025Consistently Simulating Human Personas with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
  2. 2025Teaching Language Models to Evolve with Users: Dynamic Profile Modeling for Personalized Alignment
  3. 2025Human vs. Agent in Task-Oriented Conversations
  4. 2025Simulating Before Planning: Constructing Intrinsic User World Model for User-Tailored Dialogue Policy Planning
  5. 2025REALTALK: A 21-Day Real-World Dataset for Long-Term Conversation
  6. 2026Role Steering of Language Models for Social Simulations
  7. 2025Goal Alignment in LLM-Based User Simulators for Conversational AI
  8. 2026Measuring and Mitigating the Distributional Gap Between Real and Simulated User Behaviors