RecUserSim: A Realistic and Diverse User Simulator for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Luyu, Dai, Quanyu, Zhang, Zeyu, Feng, Xueyang, Zhang, Mingyu, Tang, Pengcheng, Chen, Xu, Zhu, Yue, Dong, Zhenhua
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Chen, Luyu
Dai, Quanyu
Zhang, Zeyu
Feng, Xueyang
Zhang, Mingyu
Tang, Pengcheng
Chen, Xu
Zhu, Yue
Dong, Zhenhua
author_facet Chen, Luyu
Dai, Quanyu
Zhang, Zeyu
Feng, Xueyang
Zhang, Mingyu
Tang, Pengcheng
Chen, Xu
Zhu, Yue
Dong, Zhenhua
contents Conversational recommender systems (CRS) enhance user experience through multi-turn interactions, yet evaluating CRS remains challenging. User simulators can provide comprehensive evaluations through interactions with CRS, but building realistic and diverse simulators is difficult. While recent work leverages large language models (LLMs) to simulate user interactions, they still fall short in emulating individual real users across diverse scenarios and lack explicit rating mechanisms for quantitative evaluation. To address these gaps, we propose RecUserSim, an LLM agent-based user simulator with enhanced simulation realism and diversity while providing explicit scores. RecUserSim features several key modules: a profile module for defining realistic and diverse user personas, a memory module for tracking interaction history and discovering unknown preferences, and a core action module inspired by Bounded Rationality theory that enables nuanced decision-making while generating more fine-grained actions and personalized responses. To further enhance output control, a refinement module is designed to fine-tune final responses. Experiments demonstrate that RecUserSim generates diverse, controllable outputs and produces realistic, high-quality dialogues, even with smaller base LLMs. The ratings generated by RecUserSim show high consistency across different base LLMs, highlighting its effectiveness for CRS evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22897
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RecUserSim: A Realistic and Diverse User Simulator for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems
Chen, Luyu
Dai, Quanyu
Zhang, Zeyu
Feng, Xueyang
Zhang, Mingyu
Tang, Pengcheng
Chen, Xu
Zhu, Yue
Dong, Zhenhua
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) enhance user experience through multi-turn interactions, yet evaluating CRS remains challenging. User simulators can provide comprehensive evaluations through interactions with CRS, but building realistic and diverse simulators is difficult. While recent work leverages large language models (LLMs) to simulate user interactions, they still fall short in emulating individual real users across diverse scenarios and lack explicit rating mechanisms for quantitative evaluation. To address these gaps, we propose RecUserSim, an LLM agent-based user simulator with enhanced simulation realism and diversity while providing explicit scores. RecUserSim features several key modules: a profile module for defining realistic and diverse user personas, a memory module for tracking interaction history and discovering unknown preferences, and a core action module inspired by Bounded Rationality theory that enables nuanced decision-making while generating more fine-grained actions and personalized responses. To further enhance output control, a refinement module is designed to fine-tune final responses. Experiments demonstrate that RecUserSim generates diverse, controllable outputs and produces realistic, high-quality dialogues, even with smaller base LLMs. The ratings generated by RecUserSim show high consistency across different base LLMs, highlighting its effectiveness for CRS evaluation.
title RecUserSim: A Realistic and Diverse User Simulator for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22897