E-Commerce Bench is an open‑source benchmark that simulates a year‑long e‑commerce operation, requiring LLM agents to manage multiple online stores, negotiate with suppliers, optimize sales, fulfill orders, handle returns, and manage cash flow. The environment uses real product and supplier data, a calendar of promotions and shocks, and deterministic customer and negotiation models to enable reproducible evaluation. The study evaluates 18 state‑of‑the‑art models across seven metrics, finding no single model dominates, with GPT‑5.6 Sol achieving the highest year‑end assets but lagging in fraud avoidance and operational efficiency.
By Wei Fan, Xinjie Shen, Xudong Guo, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Yinger Zhang, Lianghao Deng, Fengyu Wang, Baohua Dong, Yangqiu Song, Dayiheng Liu
arXiv:2607. 11684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandits model relevance-driven choice but ignore the potential benefits of within-assortment diversity, while submodular/combinatorial bandits encode diversity in rewards but lack structured choice probabilities.
By Heesang Ann, Taehyun Hwang, Min-hwan Oh
The paper introduces a cost‑aware controller called certified predictive advice gating that decides when to request language‑model advice in reinforcement learning. By forecasting advisor responses, evaluating parsed actions, and reusing cached advice, the gate only requests advice when a calibrated lower bound on the value exceeds the cost. Experiments on BabyAI tasks show that the gate improves return while reducing advice calls by over 97 % compared to always asking, though matched‑budget comparisons do not show a clear advantage over an early‑query schedule.
By Ibne Farabi Shihab, Md Najmus Swaqeeb, Abu Sa-Adat Mohamed Moon-Im Al Ahsan, Joyanta Jyoti Mondal
This paper considers a decision-maker tasked with identifying the $k$ best items from a large pool of candidates, such as job applicants, LLMs, award nominees, or new product ideas. The decision-maker...
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:2609.00710v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: An LLM application often sells or internally allocates several service products: a small or premium model, a short or long token cap, and possibly mu...
By Patrick Wong
arXiv:2610.26380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: This paper considers a decision-maker tasked with identifying the $k$ best items from a large pool of candidates, such as job applicants, LLM...
By Motti Goldberger, Nils Rudi
StoreBench is a live‑commerce environment where an autonomous agent runs a mid‑size online apparel store on a production‑grade backend, facing continuous customer orders, supplier price changes, and market shocks. The agent uses the same 29 merchant tools as a human operator, with a windowed operation budget that ties simulated time to actions, ensuring that model latency does not affect the simulation. Seven large language models were evaluated across 11 scenarios of 30–45 days and a full simulated year, but none matched the scripted smart‑triage policy, and human experts outperformed all models.
By Daksh Raghuvanshi, Ved Vedere, Yifan Wang
arXiv:2601. 01279v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When competing sellers delegate pricing to a shared AI model, such as a large language model, correlated recommendations combined with performance-driven updates aggregating seller feedback raise a key question: can standard AI deployment practices inadvertently produce supracompetitive pricing?
By Shengyu Cao, Ming Hu
The paper proposes replacing multiple horizon‑specific binary classifiers with a single survival model to predict time‑to‑repurchase in grocery e‑commerce. Empirical analysis shows a slightly decreasing hazard (k≈0.9) and that a Log‑Normal model best fits marginal distributions while Weibull best fits residuals. A single Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model matches or surpasses per‑horizon classifiers with fewer trees, and a 4‑parameter calibration maps survival CDFs to horizon probabilities without monotonicity violations, revealing a trade‑off between calibration and ranking within the AFT family.
By Akshay Kekuda, Shreeranjani Srirangamsridharan, Ishan Bhatt, Yanan Cao, Sinduja Subramaniam, Evren Korpeoglu, Kaushiki Nag, Kannan Achan
arXiv:2608. 09282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world shopping often requires constructing a basket of complementary items rather than retrieving a single product.
By Adrian Li, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Heming Xia, Xinwei Yang, Lirui Luo, Jace Wong, Pu Yao, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu
The paper extends the Expected Cost-per-Mille (eCPM) framework to handle auction and hybrid "Auction with Buy It Now" (ABIN) listings by deriving a marginal eCPM (meCPM) that captures the incremental value of showing an additional impression for items whose prices evolve dynamically. This unified ranking objective allows fixed-price, auction, and ABIN listings to be compared and ranked together. A production implementation was tested via online A/B experiments on a large e-commerce platform, yielding positive revenue gains and statistically significant improvements in user metrics, leading to deployment in production.
By Greg Kocher, Sanjana Arun