The study examines how large language models (LLMs) like GPT‑5.2, Gemini 3 Flash, and Perplexity sonar‑pro recommend brands across five industries. Using 50 brands and 250 queries repeated five times, the authors measured brand inclusion, recommendation share, competitive vacuum, and co‑mention asymmetry, finding that most queries mention at least one brand and that vacuum prevalence remained stable between February and September 2026. The analysis shows strong cross‑date consistency in recommendation patterns and no emergent clustering of brand mentions, though co‑mention structures deviate from null expectations.
By Dmitrij \.Zatuchin
arXiv:2608. 10008v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM recommenders for top-$K$ item suggestion regularly emit titles outside the target catalog.
By Srijith Ravikumar
arXiv:2606. 17443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel.
By Xi Chu, Yupeng Hou
Enterprise practitioners read agent leaderboards as if they ranked agent capability. We show, across three open agent-trace benchmarks (TheAgentCompany, $τ^2$-bench, and AppWorld), that the agent main effect accounts for less than 3% of total variance in every dataset and check type, while the agent-by-task interaction accounts for 7-23%.
The paper demonstrates that a preference‑optimization objective can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources by installing a prior‑dependent reliability switch. By training on data where a source’s stated reliability is paired with its answer, the model learns to flip its response only when the stated reliability exceeds a threshold that grows with the model’s prior. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct and Llama‑3.1‑8B show that this switch generalizes to unseen reliability values and follows stated reliability over role prestige, whereas supervised imitation fails to learn it.
By Sen Yang, Yuen-Hei Yeung
Agent evaluations tell us that a model picked the wrong tool, but rarely why. We introduce canary tools: diagnostic probe tools planted in an agent's Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool set, each engineered to probe one specific tool-selection weakness.