English
Related papers

Related papers: How to Build User Simulators to Train RL-based Dia…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human users in interactive settings such as therapy, education, and social role-play. While these simulations enable scalable training and evaluation of AI agents, off-the-shelf…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Marwa Abdulhai , Ryan Cheng , Donovan Clay , Tim Althoff , Sergey Levine , Natasha Jaques

Advances in large language models (LLMs) enable many new innovations in education. However, evaluating the effectiveness of new technology requires real students, which is time-consuming and hard to scale up. Therefore, many recent works on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Alexander Scarlatos , Jaewook Lee , Simon Woodhead , Andrew Lan

User Simulators are one of the major tools that enable offline training of task-oriented dialogue systems. For this task the Agenda-Based User Simulator (ABUS) is often used. The ABUS is based on hand-crafted rules and its output is in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Florian Kreyssig , Inigo Casanueva , Pawel Budzianowski , Milica Gasic

How can we train a dialog model to produce better conversations by learning from human feedback, without the risk of humans teaching it harmful chat behaviors? We start by hosting models online, and gather human feedback from real-time,…

We present SalesSim, a framework and testbed for evaluating the ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to simulate realistic, persona-driven customer behavior in multi-turn, multi-modal, tool-augmented online retail…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yada Pruksachatkun , Elaine Wan , Lyanna Chen , Kai-Wei Chang , Chien-Sheng Wu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Kuang Wang , Xianfei Li , Shenghao Yang , Li Zhou , Feng Jiang , Haizhou Li

User simulation has been a cost-effective technique for evaluating conversational recommender systems. However, building a human-like simulator is still an open challenge. In this work, we focus on how users reformulate their utterances…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Shuo Zhang , Mu-Chun Wang , Krisztian Balog

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in settings where they interact with a wide variety of people, including users who are unclear, impatient, or reluctant to share information. However, collecting real interaction…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Harshita Chopra , Kshitish Ghate , Aylin Caliskan , Tadayoshi Kohno , Chirag Shah , Natasha Jaques

We observe a change in the way users access information, that is, the rise of conversational information access (CIA) agents. However, the automatic evaluation of these agents remains an open challenge. Moreover, the training of CIA agents…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Nolwenn Bernard

Progress toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) faces significant bottlenecks, particularly in rigorously evaluating complex interactive systems and acquiring the vast interaction data needed for training adaptive agents. This paper…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Krisztian Balog , ChengXiang Zhai

Humans learn social norms and behaviors from verbal feedback (e.g., a parent saying "that was rude" or a friend explaining "here's why that hurt"). Yet, learning from feedback for LLMs has largely focused on domains like code and math,…

Modern virtual personal assistants provide a convenient interface for completing daily tasks via voice commands. An important consideration for these assistants is the ability to recover from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-12-13 Maryam Fazel-Zarandi , Shang-Wen Li , Jin Cao , Jared Casale , Peter Henderson , David Whitney , Alborz Geramifard

Task-oriented dialogue systems aim to fulfill user goals through natural language interactions. They are ideally evaluated with human users, which however is unattainable to do at every iteration of the development phase. Simulated users…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Nurul Lubis , Christian Geishauser , Hsien-Chin Lin , Carel van Niekerk , Michael Heck , Shutong Feng , Milica Gašić

User simulation is essential for generating enough data to train a statistical spoken dialogue system. Previous models for user simulation suffer from several drawbacks, such as the inability to take dialogue history into account, the need…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-07-04 Layla El Asri , Jing He , Kaheer Suleman

Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained popularity in the realm of recommender systems due to its ability to optimize long-term rewards and guide users in discovering relevant content. However, the successful implementation of RL in…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Nathan Corecco , Giorgio Piatti , Luca A. Lanzendörfer , Flint Xiaofeng Fan , Roger Wattenhofer

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been witnessed its potential for training a dialogue policy agent towards maximizing the accumulated rewards given from users. However, the reward can be very sparse for it is usually only provided at the end…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Hongru Wang , Huimin Wang , Zezhong Wang , Kam-Fai Wong

Simulators are a critical component of modern robotics research. Strategies for both perception and decision making can be studied in simulation first before deployed to real world systems, saving on time and costs. Despite significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Bhairav Mehta , Ankur Handa , Dieter Fox , Fabio Ramos

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in interactive applications, and human evaluation remains the gold standard for assessing their performance in multi-turn conversations. Since human studies are costly, time-consuming, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yao Dou , Michel Galley , Baolin Peng , Chris Kedzie , Weixin Cai , Alan Ritter , Chris Quirk , Wei Xu , Jianfeng Gao

A good dialogue agent should have the ability to interact with users by both responding to questions and by asking questions, and importantly to learn from both types of interaction. In this work, we explore this direction by designing a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-02-14 Jiwei Li , Alexander H. Miller , Sumit Chopra , Marc'Aurelio Ranzato , Jason Weston

User-machine interaction is crucial for information retrieval, especially for spoken content retrieval, because spoken content is difficult to browse, and speech recognition has a high degree of uncertainty. In interactive retrieval, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-04-03 Pei-Hung Chung , Kuan Tung , Ching-Lun Tai , Hung-Yi Lee