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: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
The paper examines how large language model (LLM) based graphical user interface (GUI) agents respond to digital nudges. Using a randomized online shopping experiment with 3,600 agents across six frontier models, it finds that agents are vulnerable to both automatic and reflective nudges. The study shows that the agents’ reasoning configuration moderates these effects in opposite directions—reducing susceptibility to automatic nudges while increasing it to reflective social influence nudges—and that this redirection is systematically linked to model scale.
The study examines how large language model (LLM)–based graphical user interface (GUI) agents respond to digital nudges. Using Dual‑Process Theory, researchers tested 3,600 agents across six frontier models in an online shopping experiment and found that the agents were susceptible to both automatic (Type 1) and reflective (Type 2) nudges. The agents’ reasoning configuration moderated these effects in opposite directions: extensive reasoning reduced susceptibility to automatic default nudges but increased susceptibility to reflective social‑influence nudges, with the effect systematically varying by model scale.
By Haya Halimeh, Sascha Kaltenpoth, Kevin B\"osch, Oliver M\"uller
CAFE (Coupled Agent–Feedback Evolution) is a framework that lets a shared‑parameter model alternate between acting as a search agent and as a critic that provides corrective feedback. By learning when to request feedback and how to use it, CAFE trains the agent to recover from its own failures and shapes rewards both online and offline. Experiments on seven search benchmarks show that CAFE outperforms other RL‑based agents, maintains gains on out‑of‑domain tests, and reduces hallucinations, indicating that co‑evolving feedback is essential for self‑improving search agents.
By Boyang Liu, Senjie Jin, Peixin Wang, Zhangyue Yin, Yibo Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbing Liang, Shizheng Zhu, Yuhui Wang, Jingqi Tong, Zhiheng Xi, Jiazheng Zhang, Clive Bai, Clarenceai, Blaze Chen, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Outcome-supervised search agents learn when and how to retrieve evidence, but terminal rewards neither localize intermediate errors nor redirect an ongoing trajectory before those errors compound. Tre...