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
The study examines how conversational LLM agents—specifically ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek—use Web search, combining real user interactions with controlled API experiments. It finds that agents differ in when they decide to search, how they craft queries, and which domains they favor, and that more frequent searching does not always improve answer quality. While most responses are grounded in search results, some claims are unsupported, raising attribution concerns.
By Mahsa Amani, Seungeon Lee, Abhisek Dash, Asmaa El Fraihi, Yunah Jang, Elisabeth Kirsten, Qinyuan Wu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Manish Gupta, Abhilasha Ravichander, Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Soumi Das
arXiv:2606. 17698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked.
By Zeyao Du, Tong Li, Haibo Zhang
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:2607. 12056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online shopping is increasingly shifting toward a model in which AI agents independently search for products, compare options, evaluate constraints, and carry out parts of the purchasing process for users.
By Said Elnaffar, Farzad Rashidi
The paper introduces a hypothesis-driven simulation workflow that screens customer experience (CX) agents before deployment, using synthetic customers and simulated tool outputs to emulate multi-step interactions without accessing production backends. Applied to Nubank’s high-volume Card Delivery and Card Management chat-support agents, the simulation’s binary evaluator scores correlated strongly with production results, and simulation-guided iterations raised transactional net promoter score by 36.69 points in a live A/B test. Additionally, screening over 16,000 simulated conversations helped select a model that increased self‑service rate by 8.82 percentage points without harming net promoter score, demonstrating that simulation enables extensive model exploration safely.
By Edesio Alcoba, Kevin Rossell, Aman Gupta, Shao Tang, Jiwoo Hong, Pabel Carrillo-Mendoza, Wanderson Concei\c{c}\~ao Ferreira, Alvaro Tedeschi, Zayd Simjee, Shreya Rajpal, Bruno Finardi Hime, Christian Sousa, Luis Moneda, Herbert Fei, Daniel Silva, Rohan Ramanath
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.
By Xinwei Yang, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei
arXiv:2603. 29888v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In collaboration with Alibaba, we study how a generative AI assistant affects service performance in e-commerce after-sales operations.
By Xiao Ni, Yiwei Wang, Tianjun Feng, Lauren Xiaoyan Lu, Yitong Wang, Congyi Zhou
arXiv:2607. 28956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly evaluated as autonomous tool users, yet most benchmarks focus on bounded tasks with immediate success criteria.
By Qiming Shi, Yulong Tao, Linbo Jin, Zhaolu Kang, Yibo Dou, Jiawen Zhu, Tianjun Pan, Shaokang Fu, Chengyu Wang, Siyue Li, Yaping Cheng, Di Weng, Chengfu Huo
Traditional search systems are optimized to retrieve items that strictly match a query, often prioritizing precision over recall. In e-commerce marketplaces and particularly grocery, this paradigm is limiting, as user satisfaction and commercial outcomes depend heavily on the discoverability of substitute, complementary, and thematically related items.
arXiv:2607. 20536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-use agents that address day-to-day digital tasks such as ordering groceries must not only operate applications, but also interact with the user, e.
By Junzhi Chen, Harsh Trivedi, Jane Pan, Michael JQ Zhang, Tejas Srinivasan, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Ashish Sabharwal
arXiv:2607. 27172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional search systems are optimized to retrieve items that strictly match a query, often prioritizing precision over recall.
By Ji Xin, Xiao Xiao, Ishan Bhatt, Vinesh Gudla, Trace Levinson, Raochuan Fan, Shishir Kumar Prasad, Prakash Putta, Tejaswi Tenneti