MUSE: Multi-Domain Chinese User Simulation via Self-Evolving Profiles and Rubric-Guided Alignment

Faithful user simulation is fundamental to building, evaluating, and improving interactive AI at scale. Yet current simulators often produce plausible individual responses without reproducing the intent evolution and outcomes observed in real interactions. We propose TRACER, a multi-turn user simulator that models evolving user intent and aligns simulated trajectories with real ones. TRACER is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning on real user dialogues, followed by multi-turn reinforcement learning. The RL stage combines hierarchical outcome- and trajectory-level rewards with deviation-aware advantage modulation, jointly addressing reward sparsity and credit assignment challenges in long dialogues. On real customer-service sessions organized into reference cohorts, TRACER-7B surpasses the strongest baseline by 11.4 conversion F1 points, while outperforming all baselines on group-level conversion-rate error and semantic trajectory distance and generalizing to out-of-distribution scenarios. In human Turing tests, annotators identified TRACER conversations at near-chance accuracy. Building on this simulator, we further introduce the Dynamic Marketing Benchmark, which jointly evaluates persuasion and response quality via simulated interactions, revealing that higher response quality does not necessarily correspond to higher conversion rates.

User simulators are widely used as scalable environments for training and evaluating interactive assistants. Generating the next user turn is inherently one-to-many: the same profile and dialogue context may support multiple plausible continuations with different local interaction intents. A fluent response may therefore advance the dialogue through an inappropriate intent, such as acceptance rather than repair. Our key insight is that controllable user simulation should separate which local interaction intent the next user turn should realize from how that intent is expressed in language. We introduce UserIDA (User Intent-Directive Alignment), which exposes interaction intent as an explicit per-turn directive. UserIDA defines a six-way intent interface, learns directive-conditioned generation through supervised fine-tuning, and uses intent-calibrated policy optimization during group-based reinforcement learning. The reward preserves composite response quality while ensuring that intent-violating candidates rank below compliant alternatives in mixed groups. On LMSYS-USP, UserIDA achieves 86.6% intent accuracy, outperforming the strongest dedicated user-simulator baseline by 24.3 percentage points while improving semantic and stylistic similarity. In within-context interventions, it realizes at least four of the six target intents in 91.7% of evaluated dialogue states, compared with 22.9% for the strongest external baseline. These results establish per-turn intent control as a complementary dimension to response fidelity in user simulation.

Training and evaluating interactive language agents typically requires rich user interactions, yet collecting human feedback is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulated users offer a scalable alternative, but they must both resemble real user behavior and provide useful learning experiences for agents. In contrast, most agent-training frameworks rely on off-the-shelf assistant LLMs, whose helpfulness can make them overly cooperative, explicit, and behaviorally homogeneous compared with real users. We introduce MIMESIS, a purpose-built user simulator trained on human conversations with explicit reasoning supervision and 13 realistic behavioral patterns derived from real user interactions. Empirically, our 9B model achieves a SOUL-Index of 65.7, surpassing the strongest frontier model. Compared with Claude-Opus-5, the strongest baseline on RealUserSim and SimulatorArena, MIMESIS improves behavioral fidelity by 13.4 points and reduces Turing distance by 3.6 points, respectively. We then freeze the simulator and train an agent by interacting with the frozen simulator using multi-turn reinforcement learning. Across eight environments, training with MIMESIS yields better agent performance than training with GPT-5.5 under all nine unseen user simulators, demonstrating stronger generalization to new user simulators. Moreover, we propose Coached On-Policy Self-Distillation (CSD), which leverages simulator-generated private reasoning traces and subsequent utterances as feedback on how well the agent addresses user needs. A coach converts this information into concise coaching notes that describe how the agent can better anticipate user needs and adapt its behavior over the course of an interaction. CSD turns this feedback into dense, token-level supervision beyond sparse task rewards, yielding further gains across all nine evaluation user models.