MirrorBench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Conversational User-Proxy Agents for Human-Likeness

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as human simulators, both for evaluating conversational systems and for generating fine-tuning data. However, naive "act-as-a-user" prompting often yields verbose, unrealistic utterances, motivating principled evaluation of *user proxy agents*. We present **MirrorBench**, a reproducible and extensible benchmarking framework that evaluates user proxies solely on their ability to produce human-like user utterances across diverse conversational regimes, explicitly decoupled from downstream task success. **MirrorBench** combines three lexical-diversity metrics (**MATTR**, **Yule's~$K$**, and **HD-D**) with three LLM-judge-based metrics (**GTEval**, **Pairwise Indistinguishability**, and **Rubric-and-Reason**), and contextualizes judge scores using Human-Human and Proxy-Proxy calibration controls. Across four public datasets, **MirrorBench** yields variance-aware comparisons and reveals systematic gaps between user proxies and real human users. The framework is open sourced at https://github.com/SAP/mirrorbench and includes a command-line interface for running and managing user-proxy benchmarking experiments.