Related papers: Quantifying the Utility of User Simulators for Bui…

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…

As NLP evaluation shifts from static benchmarks to multi-turn interactive settings, LLM-based simulators have become widely used as user proxies, serving two roles: generating user turns and providing evaluation signals. Yet, these…

Conversations with LMs involve two participants: a human user leading the conversation, and an LM assistant responding to the user's request. To satisfy this specific role, LMs are post-trained to be helpful assistants -- optimized to…

LLM-based user simulation is the primary mechanism for end-to-end agent evaluation, yet simulated users are poor proxies for real humans: unconstrained LLM defaults produce a Formalism Ceiling (style match rates of 6-8% against real users),…

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…

User simulators can rapidly generate a large volume of timely user behavior data, providing a testing platform for reinforcement learning-based recommender systems, thus accelerating their iteration and optimization. However, prevalent user…

In recent years, AI has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviors, particularly those implemented with large language models (LLMs). However, due to the lack of systematic evaluation of LLMs' simulated behaviors,…

User simulators are essential for training reinforcement learning (RL) based dialog models. The performance of the simulator directly impacts the RL policy. However, building a good user simulator that models real user behaviors is…

Studying and building datasets for dialogue tasks is both expensive and time-consuming due to the need to recruit, train, and collect data from study participants. In response, much recent work has sought to use large language models (LLMs)…

Fulfilling user needs through Large Language Model multi-turn, multi-step tool-use is rarely a straightforward process. Real user interactions are inherently wild, being intricate, messy, and flexible. We identify three key challenges from…

Large language model (LLM) simulations of human behavior have the potential to revolutionize the social and behavioral sciences, if and only if they faithfully reflect real human behaviors. Current evaluations of simulation fidelity are…

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…

As LLMs become more widely deployed, there is increasing interest in directly optimizing for feedback from end users (e.g. thumbs up) in addition to feedback from paid annotators. However, training to maximize human feedback creates a…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as simulated participants in social science experiments, but their behavior is often unstable and highly sensitive to design choices. Prior evaluations frequently conflate base-model…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate how specific users respond to a given context, enabling more user-centric applications that rely on user feedback. However, existing user simulators mostly imitate surface-level…

Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of…

Assistive agents should not only take actions on behalf of a human, but also step out of the way and cede control when there are important decisions to be made. However, current methods for building assistive agents, whether via mimicking…

With the rapid adoption of LLM-based chatbots, there is a pressing need to evaluate what humans and LLMs can achieve together. However, standard benchmarks, such as MMLU, measure LLM capabilities in isolation (i.e., "AI-alone"). Here, we…

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful dialogue agents, but specializing them towards fulfilling a specific function can be challenging. Instructing tuning, i.e. tuning models on instruction and sample responses generated by humans…

LLM-powered agents are both a promising new technology and a source of complexity, where choices about models, tools, and prompting can affect their usefulness. While numerous benchmarks measure agent accuracy across domains, they mostly…