Can LLM Agents Simulate Multi-Turn Human Behavior? Evidence from Real Online Customer Behavior Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lu, Yuxuan, Huang, Jing, Han, Yan, Yao, Bingsheng, Bei, Sisong, Gesi, Jiri, Xie, Yaochen, Sang, Yisi, Zheshen, Wang, He, Qi, Wang, Dakuo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Lu, Yuxuan
Huang, Jing
Han, Yan
Yao, Bingsheng
Bei, Sisong
Gesi, Jiri
Xie, Yaochen
Sang, Yisi
Zheshen
Wang
He, Qi
Wang, Dakuo
author_facet Lu, Yuxuan
Huang, Jing
Han, Yan
Yao, Bingsheng
Bei, Sisong
Gesi, Jiri
Xie, Yaochen
Sang, Yisi
Zheshen
Wang
He, Qi
Wang, Dakuo
contents Recent research shows that LLM Agents can generate ``believable'' human behaviors via prompt-only methods, and such agents have been increasingly adopted in downstream applications. However, existing evaluation of these agents only focuses on qualitative believability (whether human raters think they are accurate), leaving open questions of whether LLM agents can accurately generate step-by-step actions mimicking a particular human's behavior in a multi-turn interaction task. In this work, we take shopping as a case study and present the first large-scale quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs' ability to accurately simulate human behavior. Using real-world data from 31,865 online shopping sessions containing 230,965 user actions, our evaluation reveals that prompt-based LLMs (DeepSeek-R1, Llama, Claude) achieve only 11.86% accuracy in generating human actions, highlighting a substantial gap in actual behavioral accuracy. Through experiments, we also showcase that strategies as simple as fine-tuning LLMs on real human click-through data augmented with synthesized reasoning traces can greatly enhance models' performance. The fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B achieves 17.26% action generation accuracy and 33.86% F1 score on final purchase prediction, representing substantial improvements of 5.4% and 13.85% over prompt-only baselines. This work establishes the first rigorous benchmark for human behavior simulation and provides actionable insights for developing more accurate LLM agents for future downstream applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_20749
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can LLM Agents Simulate Multi-Turn Human Behavior? Evidence from Real Online Customer Behavior Data
Lu, Yuxuan
Huang, Jing
Han, Yan
Yao, Bingsheng
Bei, Sisong
Gesi, Jiri
Xie, Yaochen
Sang, Yisi
Zheshen
Wang
He, Qi
Wang, Dakuo
Computation and Language
Recent research shows that LLM Agents can generate ``believable'' human behaviors via prompt-only methods, and such agents have been increasingly adopted in downstream applications. However, existing evaluation of these agents only focuses on qualitative believability (whether human raters think they are accurate), leaving open questions of whether LLM agents can accurately generate step-by-step actions mimicking a particular human's behavior in a multi-turn interaction task. In this work, we take shopping as a case study and present the first large-scale quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs' ability to accurately simulate human behavior. Using real-world data from 31,865 online shopping sessions containing 230,965 user actions, our evaluation reveals that prompt-based LLMs (DeepSeek-R1, Llama, Claude) achieve only 11.86% accuracy in generating human actions, highlighting a substantial gap in actual behavioral accuracy. Through experiments, we also showcase that strategies as simple as fine-tuning LLMs on real human click-through data augmented with synthesized reasoning traces can greatly enhance models' performance. The fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B achieves 17.26% action generation accuracy and 33.86% F1 score on final purchase prediction, representing substantial improvements of 5.4% and 13.85% over prompt-only baselines. This work establishes the first rigorous benchmark for human behavior simulation and provides actionable insights for developing more accurate LLM agents for future downstream applications.
title Can LLM Agents Simulate Multi-Turn Human Behavior? Evidence from Real Online Customer Behavior Data
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20749