Lost in Simulation: LLM-Simulated Users are Unreliable Proxies for Human Users in Agentic Evaluations
Preethi Seshadri University of California, Irvine, Samuel Cahyawijaya Cohere, Ayomide Odumakinde Cohere, Sameer Singh University of California, Irvine, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant Cohere
Agentic benchmarks increasingly rely on LLM-simulated users to scalably evaluate agent performance, yet the robustness, validity, and fairness of this approach remain unexamined. Through a user study with participants across the United States, India, Kenya, and Nigeria, we investigate whether LLM-simulated users serve as reliable proxies for real human users in evaluating agents on τ-Bench retail tasks. We find that user simulators lack robustness, with agent success rates varying up to 9 percentage points across different user LLMs. Furthermore, simulated users systematically miscalibrate performance, underestimating success on challenging tasks while overestimating moderately difficult ones. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers experience consistently worse success rates and calibration errors than Standard American English (SAE) speakers, with disparities compounding significantly with age. We also find simulated users to be a differentially effective proxy for different populations, performing worst for AAVE and Indian English. Additionally, simulated users introduce conversational artifacts and surface different failure patterns than human users. These findings demonstrate that current evaluation practices risk misrepresenting agent capabilities across diverse user populations and may obscure real-world deployment challenges.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表