Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profiles
Kuang Wang, Xianfei Li, Shenghao Yang, Li Zhou, Feng Jiang, Haizhou Li
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 wellknown 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 finetuning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency, optimizing at both the utterance and conversation levels. Finally, a diverse profile sampler captures the distribution of realworld 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 multiturn aligns well with mainstream benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications. We open-source related resources in https://github.com/wangkevin02/USP .
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