Overview

User modeling builds representations of people from interaction histories, queries, clicks, conversations, sensor streams, or learning outcomes so systems can predict needs and adapt recommendations, tutoring, and agents. Common approaches include sequential and graph encoders for behavioral data, latent-state and hierarchical persona models, retrieval-based or compact memory for language models, and synthetic-user simulation. Systems are evaluated on recommendation and next-action tasks, personalization benchmarks, and educational or conversational settings, with growing attention to temporal change, uncertainty, and evidence for inferred traits. A central open tension is whether these models genuinely capture individual users: synthetic personas and automatic judges can miss real preferences, while richer behavioral data raises privacy and over-inference risks.

Latest papers

CardsList

151 papers17 papers in the last four weeks, up 42% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Implicit Minor Detection from Multi-Turn Dialogue in High-Risk AI Interactions: A Constrained Self-Evolving LLM Harness

    Oct 28, 2026Xiaohan Zhang, Ying Zhao, Ruilin Guo +5LLM Safety MonitoringUser Modeling

  2. The Anatomy of Socio-Demographics in Pluralistic Offensiveness Modeling: When and Where It Helps, and the Role of Reasoning

    Oct 27, 2026Yifan Wang, Leixin Zhang, Jinyi Mu +4User ModelingAnnotator Disagreement

  3. Making Reasoning Visible: Configuration-Aware Diagnostic Modeling for Adaptive Scaffolding in Structured Reasoning Tasks

    Oct 26, 2026Trystan Geoffre, Zheng Yuan, Thierry GeoffreUser ModelingCognitive Diagnostic Models

  4. iPrefBench: A User-Centric Benchmark for Personalized Mobile Use Agents

    Oct 26, 2026Yuting Ning, Ruijia Cheng, Sushobhan Ghosh +7Personal AI AgentsMobile Agent Benchmarks

  5. HABIT-Bench: Evaluating Habit Induction from Longitudinal Weak Evidence in Agent Memory

    Oct 17, 2026Junming Zhang, Rubin Wei, Xu Cheng +7LLM Agent MemoryMemory Agent Benchmarks

  6. Learning User Representations to Improve Simulation Fidelity

    Oct 15, 2026Shuhaib Mehri, Philippe Laban, Michel Galley +3User SimulationUser Modeling

  7. A Unified Response Framework for Questions and Tutoring Dialogues

    Oct 14, 2026Zhangqi Duan, Simon Woodhead, Maya Miller-Vedam +1Educational AssessmentIntelligent Tutoring Systems

  8. SimInter: Evidence-Grounded User Simulation with Interview-Based Profile Enrichment for Conversational Recommender Systems

    Oct 13, 2026Erfan Shahabi, Amirhossein Roshandel, Mohammad Sadegh Sadeghi +1User SimulationRecommender Systems

  9. RALI@iKAT 2026: Retrieval-aware User Profile Denoising via Personalized Conversational Dense Retrieval

    Oct 13, 2026Yuchen Hui, Fengran Mo, Jia Ao Sun +3Information RetrievalConversational Search

  10. PsyMemBehav: Psychology-Informed and Memory-Grounded Two-Level Identity-to-Action Reasoning for Social-Media Behavior Simulation

    Oct 10, 2026Wenji Zhang, Xilong Cheng, Yunxiao Qin +8Human Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

  11. MARS: Multi-resolution Adaptive Routing for Sequential Recommendation

    Oct 5, 2026Ming Yin, Sixun Dong, Yudong Liu +3Sequential RecommendationUser Modeling

  12. Data-Driven Personas for Survey Simulation: Insights into Simulation Alignment Across Data-Access Regimes

    Oct 5, 2026Dongryeol Lee, Weronika Łajewska, Leonardo Perelli +1Computational Social ScienceUser Modeling

  13. Dataset Signatures in Human-LLM Interactions and User Modeling

    Oct 4, 2026Joseph Suh, Serina ChangLLM EvaluationUser Modeling

  14. CUEing User Simulators: Calibrated User Embeddings for Multi-Turn Benchmarking

    Oct 1, 2026Anjali Kantharuban, Jonas MuellerUser SimulationAI Agent Benchmarks

  15. RealCompanion: Benchmarking Human Understanding from Reasoning over Longitudinal Real-World Conversations

    Oct 1, 2026Arman Behnam, Sunglyoung Kim, Jiayi Yu +2Memory Agent BenchmarksUser Modeling

  16. Action-On-Item Preference Flow: A Shared Event Schema for Predictive and Generative Personalization

    Oct 1, 2026Parthiv Chatterjee, Kashish Kanjaria, Vashisth Purani +2User ModelingState Tracking

  17. Embodiment-aware control by inference over the operator: a simulation study

    Sep 29, 2026Sara FalconeActive InferenceRobot Teleoperation

  18. SimTrace: Grounded Multimodal User Trajectories Generation for Online User Modeling

    Sep 29, 2026Yunan Lu, Shuang Xie, Meghna Allamudi +4Synthetic Data GenerationUser Modeling

  19. What Happens During Autonomous Deep Research After the User Steps Away?

    Sep 27, 2026Yimin Liu, Yijia Zhang, Yanmin Li +4Counterfactual EvaluationDeep Research Agents

  20. User Model Extraction via Belief Self-Distillation

    Sep 25, 2026Ali Holmov, Yiran Huang, Kirill Bykov +1User ModelingLLM Interpretability

  21. RACER: Role-Aligned Competence Estimation for Human-AI Routing

    Sep 18, 2026Joshua Strong, Emma Sun, Alexander Capstick +3Learning to DeferHuman-AI Decision Making

  22. Behavioral Fingerprinting and Navigation Prediction in Web Browsing

    Sep 16, 2026Ralph Elsaghbini, Omran Berjawi, Walid Fahs +1User ModelingHuman Behavior Prediction

  23. Memory Has Geometry: Non-Uniform Geometric Memory for Long-Horizon Personalized AI

    Sep 16, 2026Jiahong Liu, Wenhao Yu, Zexuan Qiu +2Neural Representation GeometryLLM Personalization

  24. QueryFormer: Winning Solution for KDD Cup 2026 Tencent UniRec Challenge

    Sep 15, 2026Yuanzhe Zhou, Zhaoyang ZengConversion Rate PredictionUser Modeling