Abstract Interactive search, where a set of tags is recommended to users together with search results at each turn, is an effective way to guide users to identify their information need. It is a classical sequential decision problem and the reinforcement learning based agent can be introduced as a solution. The training of the agent can be divided into two stages, i.e., offline and online. Existing reinforcement learning based systems tend to perform the offline training in a supervised way based on historical labeled data while the online training is performed via reinforcement learning algorithms based on interactions with real users. The mis-match between online and offline training leads to a cold-start problem for the online usage of the agent. To address this issue, we propose to employ a simulator to mimic the environment for the offline training of the agent. Users’ profiles are considered to build a personalized simulator, besides, modelbased approach is used to train the simulator and is able to use the data efficiently. Experimental results based on real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our agent and personalized simulator