arXiv subjects

Arun Menon

Publications and source records attributed to Arun Menon.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Three-Tier Persona Vector for Controllable User Simulation in Agentic Evaluation

Evaluating tool-augmented LLM agents requires diverse, realistic user inputs yet most evaluation frameworks use flat role descriptions ("you are an angry customer") that produce near-identical conversations regardless of the underlying scenario. In this paper, we propose a three-tier persona vector with 23 operationalized dimensions: 6 categorical demographics (jurisdiction, age, channel, device, language proficiency, time availability), 12 continuous behavioral traits (patience, assertiveness, digital literacy, etc.) sampled with Gaussian noise around curated profile base vectors, and 5 continuous emotional states (frustration, anxiety, trust, confidence, stress) that shift in response to scenario context. Orthogonal to the persona, a 4-level query-complexity overlay controls utterance phrasing from direct to deliberately vague. We evaluate the persona model inside a synthetic data generation pipeline across 64,698 multi-turn conversations spanning 8 named profiles and 3 production corpora. Key findings: (i) a 15.8 percentage-point spread in agent goal-achievement across personas confirms trait vectors produce measurably different user behavior; (ii) the same persona behaves differently across scenarios due to scenario-reactive emotional state shifts, validating the scenario-reactive design; (iii) domain-specific projects show persona sensitivity on booking-flow compliance (~15-20 percentage points gap between tier-aware and pressure-test personas), demonstrating the model faithfully reproduces real-world difficulty distributions; (iv) seven rule-described trait correlations produce auditable co-occurrence patterns without requiring learned covariance matrices. The persona model is fully specified for reproduction.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AgentWorld: Personality-Aware Reliability Evaluation for Agentic Information Retrieval

Evaluation of agentic information retrieval remains limited to scripted interactions with uniform users, missing both natural personality diversity and adversarial brittleness. We present AgentWorld, a simulation framework combining (i)Big Five (OCEAN) personality-driven user populations with stateful tool-use environments; (ii)the pass$^k$ consistency metric with structured fault classification, partial-credit scoring, and dual-control handoff verification; (iii)score-thresholded training-data export in six fine-tuning formats; and (iv)an adversarial Risk Analyser that snapshots required-intermediate-state spines, branches Monte-Carlo rollouts under four task-aware perturbation types, and quantifies risk via $\Delta P / \Delta T$ scoring, Dempster--Shafer evidence fusion, and Shapley attack-category attribution. Three experiments demonstrate the framework: a conversational analytics agent across 10 OCEAN personas (240 evaluator judgments); a customer-support agent across 5 tasks $\times$ 4 persona variants; and adversarial stress-testing of 5 tasks revealing pre-existing trajectory brittleness ($V_{\min}=0.375$ without perturbation) and tool/infrastructure-layer attack dominance (Shapley: 46% system, 38% action). Personality variation surfaces failure modes uniform testing cannot expose---cross-domain leakage, contextual drift, a 0.27-point quality gap, and 50% vs. 100% pass-rate across personas on the same task---while the Risk Analyser quantifies trajectory-level brittleness that pass$^k$ alone cannot measure.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

State-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Tool-Augmented LLMs

Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets. We present StateGen, a synthetic data generation platform that produces scored, reasoning-trace-rich training conversations by orchestrating a four-role LLM loop: a persona-conditioned user simulator, an agent under test, a state-grounded tool simulator, and a multi-axis LLM judge. The key architectural contribution is an authoritative state manager that maintains a structured world-state object across turns, enforcing a backend-is-truth invariant that eliminates the dominant class of tool-call hallucinations by construction. StateGen extends naturally to hierarchical multi-agent settings by declaring sub-agents as tools, all sharing a single state object. We report results on 64,698 evaluated conversations across three production corpora: tool-call hallucination scores reach 9.66/10, the system supports persona-driven variation via a 23-dimensional trait vector, and a cleanly separated train and golden evaluation set split confirms the data is not memorization bait (per-criterion gap analysis). Comparison with eight external systems shows that no single publicly available platform combines multi-turn generation, state-grounded tool simulation, hierarchical multi-agent support, and built-in judge scoring.

cs.AI↗