SimTrace paper tests synthetic user trajectories for online modeling

SimTrace is a proposed framework for creating synthetic records of online user activity with a computer-use agent. The paper addresses a data challenge for virtual clients: they require extensive, detailed trajectories that retain their meaning, but access to private logs is limited by privacy restrictions and smaller businesses may lack enough traffic. The authors also identify limitations in public datasets, which may omit detailed interaction or preserve context while remaining small and tied to particular platforms.

SimTrace uses anonymized real interactions alongside a simulated copy of the target web environment to generate synthetic trajectories. Its computer-use agent is grounded in both real user behavior and the web environment, according to the paper. The resulting data links each action to observations of the web page and information about the user’s context. The authors present these linked records as a shareable alternative to confidential logs for developing virtual clients that operate as computer-use agents.

The researchers evaluated SimTrace in an e-commerce setting, measuring the generated data’s fidelity and its usefulness in downstream tasks. They report better results than competing baselines on seven of eight fidelity measures. Models trained with synthetic data performed comparably to models trained with real data on purchase prediction and recommendation. For next-action prediction, combining synthetic examples with real data improved accuracy by 11.0% compared with training on real data alone.

The findings give AI builders evidence that generated interaction traces can support some online behavior modeling tasks, and that adding them to real training data may help with next-action prediction. The reported evaluation is in e-commerce, so the abstract does not establish whether the same results hold in other settings. For developers, the framework’s paired actions, page observations and user context describe what its synthetic trajectories contain, rather than treating them as interaction counts alone. The authors say SimTrace is being released as an open-source package to support research on online user behavior modeling.