English

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

Computation and Language 2025-07-01 v4

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.18968,
  title  = {Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profiles},
  author = {Kuang Wang and Xianfei Li and Shenghao Yang and Li Zhou and Feng Jiang and Haizhou Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.18968},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

9 pages. Accepted to ACL 2025. Camera-ready version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:58:26.618Z