@inproceedings{su-etal-2026-query,
    title = "Query-Focused Individual Simulation with Progressive Persona Completion",
    author = "SU, Weiwen  and
      Yoshinaga, Naoki  and
      Toyoda, Masashi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1686/",
    pages = "33778--33792",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) enable simulating individual responses from persona information, supporting applications such as opinion elicitation and virtual character creation. However, existing approaches typically assume rich persona profiles, which are often unavailable in practice. In this work, motivated by recent findings that LLMs can identify query-relevant persona dimensions (e.g., whether a user is price-sensitive), we study query-focused individual simulation under cold-start settings, where relevant persona information is identified and requested on demand for each query. To solve this task while minimizing the number of persona requests, we explore a progressive method that iteratively predicts the most critical relevant persona dimension and uses self-reported confidence as a stopping signal to determine when sufficient information has been collected. Experiments on two dialogue datasets show that this query-driven paradigm achieves simulation performance comparable to approaches that rely on rich persona information extracted from dialogue history, using only a few persona dimensions (up to five per query), and this number is further reduced by our progressive method while maintaining or improving simulation quality."
}