arXiv AI

RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce

RealWorldShop introduces a new benchmark for conversational shopping agents, featuring 3.28 million grounded products, structured shopping episodes, a profile‑grounded user simulator, and role‑play evaluation. Analysis reveals that existing systems generate locally plausible responses but struggle with state tracking, constraint updating, and grounded convergence, especially in ambiguous or multi‑intent scenarios. The authors propose REALSHOP_AGENT, a session‑control framework with explicit state management, shopping‑flow control, catalog‑grounded retrieval, and runtime guards, which consistently outperforms strong baselines on the benchmark.

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 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
Aug 3

DRIP-R: A Benchmark for Decision-Making and Reasoning Under Real-World Policy Ambiguity in the Retail Domain

arXiv:2605. 07699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed for routine but consequential tasks in real-world domains, where their behavior is governed by inherently ambiguous domain policies that admit multiple valid interpretations.

By Hsuvas Borkakoty, Sebastian Pohl, Cheng Wang, Bei Chen, Yufang Hou
arXiv AI
4d ago

Bootstrapping Conversational Recommendation Agents At Spotify: Synthetic Data Generation and Self-Improvement Loops

The paper presents a pipeline for generating multi‑turn synthetic conversations and a self‑improvement loop that uses variance‑based contrastive optimization and a coding agent to refine planning and tool‑use in conversational recommendation agents. This approach improves agent quality by 8% over a manually optimized prompt and has been deployed at Spotify, where it accelerated development cycles. In production, the system achieved a 14% increase in user listening, a 5% rise in weekly active users, and a 5% reduction in skip rate compared to a prior session‑only experience.

By Enrico Palumbo, Alexandre Tamborrino, Victor Ode, Ben Lacker, Adri\`a Casas Escoda, Jeremy Hopple, Marcus Better, James Leoni, Hugo Galv\~ao, Hugues Bouchard, Mounia Lalmas, Jos\'e Luis Redondo Garc\'ia, Abenezer Abebe, Ann Clifton, Anton Blomberg, Henrik Lindstr\"om, Dani Doro, Christine Doig Cardet
arXiv AI
Aug 28

PACEShop: Evaluating Personalized, Actionable, Compositional, and Evidence-grounded Shopping Assistants

PACEShop introduces a new evaluation framework, PACE, for shopping assistants that emphasizes personalized, actionable, compositional, and evidence‑grounded responses. The benchmark dataset contains 22,625 records with structured personas, auditable evidence pools, and detailed defect annotations, while PACEJudge offers a training‑free protocol for assessing these dimensions. Experiments demonstrate that generic judges miss key diagnostic fields, whereas PACEJudge improves evaluation across persona alignment, cross‑component consistency, grounding, and defect localization without retraining.

By Weimin Lyu, Chen Luo, Guangrui Li, Yaochen Xie, Dhineshkumar Ramasubbu, Arief Koesdwiady, Wanqiu Long, Hansu Gu, Yutong Chen, Zheshen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yi Liu