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    <abstract>Evaluation remains a critical bottleneck for interactive agent development. Existing evaluation methods often rely on static benchmarks, which fail to capture the dynamic, multi-step nature of agentic behavior and struggle to expose meaningful failure modes. While user-simulation-based evaluation offers a promising alternative, existing simulation frameworks suffer from two major limitations. First, they provide limited mechanisms for evaluating the quality and comprehensiveness of simulated interactions, making it difficult to assess whether a simulator sufficiently explores an agent’s capabilities and failure modes. Second, most frameworks are restricted to either UI-only actions or API-only actions, limiting their ability to model the full range of realistic user behaviors. To address these limitations, we propose VISTA, a Versatile Interactive user Simulation Toolkit for Agent evaluation.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T VISTA: A Versatile Interactive User Simulation Toolkit for Agent Evaluation
%A Lu, Yunan
%A Shea, Ryan
%A Zhang, Yusen
%A Yu, Zhou
%Y Kamalloo, Ehsan
%Y Gontier, Nicolas
%Y Rozanov, Nikolai
%Y Hashemzadeh, Maryam
%Y Arora, Akhil
%S Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-485-9
%F lu-etal-2026-vista
%X Evaluation remains a critical bottleneck for interactive agent development. Existing evaluation methods often rely on static benchmarks, which fail to capture the dynamic, multi-step nature of agentic behavior and struggle to expose meaningful failure modes. While user-simulation-based evaluation offers a promising alternative, existing simulation frameworks suffer from two major limitations. First, they provide limited mechanisms for evaluating the quality and comprehensiveness of simulated interactions, making it difficult to assess whether a simulator sufficiently explores an agent’s capabilities and failure modes. Second, most frameworks are restricted to either UI-only actions or API-only actions, limiting their ability to model the full range of realistic user behaviors. To address these limitations, we propose VISTA, a Versatile Interactive user Simulation Toolkit for Agent evaluation.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.realm-1.92/
%P 1305-1323

Markdown (Informal)

[VISTA: A Versatile Interactive User Simulation Toolkit for Agent Evaluation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.realm-1.92/) (Lu et al., REALM 2026)

• VISTA: A Versatile Interactive User Simulation Toolkit for Agent Evaluation (Lu et al., REALM 2026)

ACL

• Yunan Lu, Ryan Shea, Yusen Zhang, and Zhou Yu. 2026. VISTA: A Versatile Interactive User Simulation Toolkit for Agent Evaluation. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026), pages 1305–1323, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.