Towards User Simulators That Stay On Task And Still Sound Natural

Mustafa Omer Gul, Philippe Laban, Tanya Goyal, Jennifer Neville

Users increasingly rely on AI systems for extended, multi-turn tasks, yet evidence indicates that LLM-based system performance degrades over prolonged interaction. To evaluate and improve AI assistants in such settings, we need user simulators that faithfully follow complex user intents while exhibiting realistic conversational behavior. Existing approaches manifest a trade-off: prompted assistants can follow complex user intents but lack behavioral fidelity, while specialized user simulators better approximate conversational behavior but struggle to remain faithful to complex intents. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) recipe that jointly rewards task intent adherence and behavioral naturalness. A crucial contribution of the method is operationalizing naturalness with a lightweight discriminator trained in an alternating, adversarial loop with the user simulator. We release the resulting model, UserLM-2.0, which produces valid simulated conversations (i.e., meeting both task-faithfulness and naturalness criteria) 46.2% of the time, over three times the rate of the strongest prior user simulator (14.1%).