SIMTRACE: Grounded Multimodal User Trajectories Generation for Online User Modeling

Virtual clients offer a cost-effective approach to support applications such as A/B testing, recommender system development, and interface evaluation. However, building them requires access to large-scale, semantically faithful, fine-grained online user trajectories. Such data is difficult to obtain because proprietary logs are subject to privacy restrictions and small businesses often lack sufficient traffic. Consequently, existing public datasets either abstract away fine-grained user interaction details or preserve rich context but remain platform-specific and small-scale. To address this gap, we propose SimTrace, a framework that generates faithful, fine-grained synthetic multimodal clickstreams grounded in real user trajectories and the given environment. SimTrace anonymizes real interactions and constructs a simulated twin of the given web environment, then uses both to generate synthetic interaction trajectories. Each action is paired with its corresponding web observations and user context, yielding a shareable alternative to confidential logs for developing virtual clients. We apply SimTrace to an e-commerce setting and evaluate both its fidelity and downstream utility. SimTrace outperforms competing baselines on 7 out of 8 fidelity metrics. Models trained on synthetic data only perform comparably to those trained on real data on downstream tasks such as purchase prediction and recommendation. For the next action prediction, augmenting real data with synthetic data further improves accuracy by 11.0\% relative to training on real data alone. We release SimTrace as an open-source package to facilitate research on online user behavior modeling.