CustomerSim: Benchmarking and Aligning Multimodal Language Models as Retail User Simulators
About
We present CustomerSim, an environment and benchmark to evaluate the extent to which Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can simulate realistic, persona-driven customer behavior in chat-based retail environments. While prior work treats user simulation as surface-level dialog generation, we focus on a model's ability to seek information and make decisions that adhere to customer specifications in multiturn, agentic simulations. CustomerSim consists of a human-curated set of 360 personas over five product categories, alongside a suite of metrics measuring consistency between a customer simulator's actions and its specifications and conversational quality. We find several behavioral gaps across five open and closed-source state-of-the-art models. First, while models produce fluent conversations, they display significantly lower lexical diversity than human shoppers, and open-source models overdisclose their criteria in the opening turn. Second, models tend to be persuaded by sales agent tone and drift from persona specifications. Even the strongest closed-source models, Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol, achieves <74% alignment with its persona specifications. To address these limitations, we propose UserGRPO, a multi-turn, multi-objective reinforcement learning recipe optimizing both conversational fluency and decision alignment under persona specifications. UserGRPO raises the decision alignment of the baseline model from 0.417 to 0.652, a gain of 23.5 points, without meaningful cost to conversational quality, and these gains transfer to held-out product categories. We further find that stylistic prompting is the only intervention that makes surface form more human-like, yet it nearly halves persona adherence. Through CustomerSim, we provide a testbed for the community to investigate and improve the adherence of user simulators in goal-oriented settings.