Work

Thinking Alignment of Scenario-Oriented User Simulation

Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Existing user simulators based on prompting to role-play or SFT are generally confined to imitating users' textual utterances, without adequately considering the multi-faceted cognitive processes that underlie human decision-making during interactions.To facilitate better alignment with real human thinking patterns, we construct the LMSYS-UserThinking dataset, in which we augment 51k human-LLM conversations by reconstructing the user's inner reasoning both during and at the end of each dialogue.Furthermore, to enhance controllability and situational coherence, we introduce scenario settings that describe the global context and user goals throughout multi-turn conversations.Using this dataset, we train user simulators called ThinkingUS on different base models.We evaluate our approach from both offline and online user simulation perspectives, ultimately demonstrating its effectiveness.
Institution: Tsinghua University
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166872845
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