paper

UserSimCRS v2: Simulation-Based Evaluation for Conversational Recommender Systems

arXiv:2512.04588

Abstract

Resources for simulation-based evaluation of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are scarce. The UserSimCRS toolkit was introduced to address this gap. In this work, we present UserSimCRS v2, a significant upgrade aligning the toolkit with state-of-the-art research. Key extensions include an enhanced agenda-based user simulator, introduction of large language model-based simulators, integration for a wider range of CRSs and datasets, and new LLM-as-a-judge evaluation utilities. We demonstrate these extensions in a case study.

Proceedings of the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR '26), 2026

UserSimCRS v2: Simulation-Based Evaluation for Conversational Recommender Systems · wovepaper