arXiv AI

When Outcome Looks Right But Discipline Fails: Trace-Based Evaluation Under Hidden Competitor State

arXiv:2605. 18580v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-only evaluation can certify economically unsafe agents: a policy can hit a business KPI while violating deployable behavioral discipline.

arXiv AI
Sep 28

PriceBench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Price, Quality, and Brand Preferences in LLM Booking Agents

PriceBench is a diagnostic benchmark that extracts price, quality, and brand preferences from large language models (LLMs) by analyzing their hotel booking choices. Using a logit choice model, the study evaluated 28 LLMs from eight providers across 3,600 booking tasks involving 179 New York City hotels. Results show that more capable LLMs exhibit stronger, more consistent preferences, while weaker models either lock onto a single position or show near-indifference, with significant variation in price sensitivity and price/quality trade-offs across providers.

By Pavel Kireyev
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
Oct 9

StoreBench: A Live-Commerce Environment for Evaluating and Training Autonomous Operator Agents

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

Training Alignment Auditors via Reinforcement Learning

The paper presents a reinforcement learning approach to enhance large language model (LLM) auditors for alignment tasks. By training policies that investigate target models for hidden behaviors and using an LLM judge to compare investigations, the method improves audit realism and reduces false positives. Experiments show better performance on adversarially fine‑tuned targets and a low false‑positive rate below 1%.

By Paul Rosu, Rowan Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

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

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. Teams therefore train the bandit on a fast proxy reward, and separately must judge whether a contextual bandit is worth its complexity over sending one best message.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

StableEval Arena: A Cost-Aware Agentic Benchmark for Stablecoin Price Stability Prediction

StableEval Arena is a cost‑aware benchmark framework designed to evaluate agentic AI systems on stablecoin peg‑risk prediction. It tests LLM‑backed agents by diagnosing peg stress and forecasting deviations from the one‑dollar peg over a hidden seven‑day horizon, using leakage‑safe historical replay with exchange price‑volume data and market‑context features. The benchmark includes a 120‑case stress‑enriched validation block and a 507‑case natural‑distribution full‑arena evaluation, measuring prediction quality, calibrated‑label behavior, structured‑output reliability, latency, token consumption, and estimated inference cost across six LLM‑backed agent configurations and baselines.

By Sean Wan, Dongping Liu, Luyao Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Supracompetitive Pricing Under AI Monoculture

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