User Simulation in the Era of Generative AI: User Modeling, Synthetic Data Generation, and System Evaluation

Understand

User simulation is an emerging interdisciplinary topic with multiple critical applications in the era of Generative AI.

• It involves creating an intelligent agent that mimics the actions of a human user interacting with an AI system, enabling researchers to model and analyze user behaviour, generate synthetic data for training, and evaluate interactive AI systems in a controlled and reproducible manner.
• Because of its broad scope, research on this topic currently remains scattered across artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, information science, computational social science, and psychology.
• To address this fragmented landscape of current research, this article presents a foundational synthesis.