@inproceedings{xie-etal-2025-ipet,
    title = "i{PET}: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with {LLM}-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation",
    author = "Xie, Zheyong  and
      Cao, Shaosheng  and
      Liu, Zuozhu  and
      Ye, Zheyu  and
      Niu, Zihan  and
      Lu, Chonggang  and
      Xu, Tong  and
      Chen, Enhong  and
      Xu, Zhe  and
      Hu, Yao  and
      Lu, Wei",
    editor = "Mishra, Pushkar  and
      Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Yu, Tao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-demo.40/",
    pages = "416--425",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-253-4",
    abstract = "The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked transformative potential for role-playing emotional companion products, enabling systems that support emotional well-being, educational development, and therapeutic applications. However, existing approaches often lack sustained personalization and contextual adaptability, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce iPET, an LLM-powered virtual pet agent designed to enhance user engagement through rich, dynamic pet behaviors and interactions tailored to individual preferences. iPET comprises three core components: a dialogue module that instantiates virtual pet agents for emotionally interactive conversations; a memory module that stores and synthesizes records of both agent and user experiences; and a world simulation module that generates diverse, preference-driven pet behaviors guided by high-level reflections. Deployed for over 200 days in a real-world, non-commercial product, iPET has served millions of users {--} providing emotional support to psychologically distressed individuals and demonstrating its effectiveness in practical applications."
}