Poster
in
Workshop: Social Sim'26: Fidelity in Applications Fri, Oct 9, 2026 • 11:45 AM – 1:00 PM PDT Imperial Ballroom A

PersonaEval: Persona-Based User Simulation for Evaluating Interactive Applications

Yifan S Liu ⋅ Qianfeng Wen ⋅ Yilan Fan ⋅ Shirley Huang ⋅ Ruoqi Gao ⋅ Jianheng Hou ⋅ Muhammad A Mohsin ⋅ Zonglin Di ⋅ Brihi Joshi ⋅ Xincheng Tan ⋅ Yucheng Lu ⋅ Xiaoyi Liu ⋅ Heming Liu ⋅ Hanwen Xing ⋅ Guanghui Min ⋅ Zhengyang Shan ⋅ My Chiffon Nguyen ⋅ Ishan Gupta ⋅ Yunze Xiao ⋅ Hannah Collison ⋅ Jintao Huang ⋅ Jiatong Li ⋅ Sankalp Jajee ⋅ Yunhan Zhao ⋅ Bing Hu ⋅ Sky Ng ⋅ Xupeng Chen ⋅ binghang lu ⋅ Weihang Xiao ⋅ Aravind Mohan ⋅ Bolun Sun ⋅ Yunshu Wu ⋅ Yuanda Xu ⋅ Yun Shen ⋅ Runyu Zhang ⋅ Zheyuan Deng ⋅ Zhiwei Zhang ⋅ Qianyu Zhu ⋅ Dianzhuo Wang ⋅ Yijun Wang ⋅ Yixuan He ⋅ Yuexing Hao ⋅ Xiaomin Li

Project Page [ OpenReview]

Abstract

Real user studies are important for understanding how people interact with systems under test or already deployed. In practice, however, they are often costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. To address these challenges, we introduce PersonaEval, a persona-based user simulation framework that approximates real-user behavior across diverse interactive settings. PersonaEval connects simulated users drawn from existing persona datasets to task-specific application interfaces and collects the interaction trajectories and outcomes. PersonaEval provides a plug-and-play evaluation workflow in which the application being evaluated can be easily changed. In this demo, we present PersonaEval on three forms of interactive applications: surveys, chatbots, and web applications. Together, these examples show that PersonaEval can support repeatable, parallelizable, and scalable evaluation across different interaction settings, while producing user-oriented feedback and task-specific behavior.

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