arXiv AI

CAVEAT: Towards Robust Computer-Use Agents in Incentive-Misaligned Environments

CAVEAT is a new benchmark that tests computer‑use agents (CUAs) in nine online marketplace environments where platform incentives may steer agents away from user goals. The study finds that agents succeed in choosing user‑optimal products only 78.6% of the time in neutral settings, dropping to 17.3% when steering mechanisms are active. By diagnosing three failure points—priority distortion, premature narrowing of options, and early commitment—CAVEAT-Harness interventions raise user‑optimal purchasing success by 55.0%.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Evaluating Open-Weight E-Commerce Agents with Environment-Grounded Verification

The paper introduces a deterministic, reproducible e‑commerce environment that pre‑commits customer and trajectory parameters, enabling a simulated consumer to attempt purchasing a target cart with the help of an evaluated model. The environment records every assistant action and state, allowing post‑trial evaluation of specific conversation components and applying penalties based on tool‑call accuracy. Using this setup, the authors benchmark eight open‑weight agents (20B–35B parameters) across 160 trials and 44 metrics, revealing nuanced performance issues such as under‑action, over‑purchase, unsupported product attributes, and poor search that are hidden by overall success rates.

By Nimit Shah, Haitz S\'aez de Oc\'ariz Borde
arXiv AI
Aug 28

ADeptS-Bench: Measuring the Trustworthiness of Computer Use Agents Across Devices

ADeptS-Bench is a new benchmark designed to assess the trustworthiness of Computer Use Agents (CUAs) across mobile and desktop devices. It consists of two streams: a Safety stream with paired benign and malicious tasks that embed visual threats, and a Disambiguation stream that tests whether agents seek clarification when instructions are ambiguous. Evaluation of seven models shows none consistently achieves high task success while keeping attack success low, and all models exhibit problematic behaviors such as unhesitant checkout on a $25K order and failure to detect a mislabeled factory reset button.

By Joy Chen, Alejandro Castillejo Munoz, Pierluca D'Oro, Yuxuan Sun, Chloe Evans, Joseph Tighe
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

A Dual-Process Perspective on Nudge Susceptibility in LLM-Based GUI Agents

The paper examines how large language model (LLM) based graphical user interface (GUI) agents respond to digital nudges. Using a randomized online shopping experiment with 3,600 agents across six frontier models, it finds that agents are vulnerable to both automatic and reflective nudges. The study shows that the agents’ reasoning configuration moderates these effects in opposite directions—reducing susceptibility to automatic nudges while increasing it to reflective social influence nudges—and that this redirection is systematically linked to model scale.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

When Offline Evaluation Misleads: A Diagnostic Protocol for Reward and Policy Selection in Delayed-Feedback Contextual Bandits

arXiv:2608. 11560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing marketing messages with contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) drives real business value, yet the objective that ultimately matters - a downstream conversion - is observed only weeks later, too late to drive online learning.

By Sang Su Lee, Vineeth Loganathan, Shishir Dash, Vijay Raghavan
arXiv AI
Aug 17

MACS: A Hybrid Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable Conversational E-Commerce Recommendation

arXiv:2608. 14068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational recommendation for e-commerce is increasingly mediated by large language models (LLMs), yet many real-world deployments operate under a stricter requirement: recommendations must be drawn only from a merchant's fixed catalog, without web search or unsupported product claims.

By Juli Huang, Hannah Clay, Sajjad Beygi, Thomas Sarda, Negin Golrezaei, Amin Saberi
arXiv AI
Sep 18

A Dual-Process Perspective on Nudge Susceptibility in LLM-Based GUI Agents

The study examines how large language model (LLM)–based graphical user interface (GUI) agents respond to digital nudges. Using Dual‑Process Theory, researchers tested 3,600 agents across six frontier models in an online shopping experiment and found that the agents were susceptible to both automatic (Type 1) and reflective (Type 2) nudges. The agents’ reasoning configuration moderated these effects in opposite directions: extensive reasoning reduced susceptibility to automatic default nudges but increased susceptibility to reflective social‑influence nudges, with the effect systematically varying by model scale.

By Haya Halimeh, Sascha Kaltenpoth, Kevin B\"osch, Oliver M\"uller