The proliferation of e-commerce has made web shopping platforms key gateways for customers navigating the vast digital marketplace. Yet this rapid expansion has led to a noisy and fragmented information environment, increasing cognitive burden as shoppers explore and purchase products online. With promising potential to alleviate this challenge, agentic systems have garnered growing attention for automating user-side tasks in web shopping. Despite significant advancements, existing benchmarks fail to comprehensively evaluate how well agentic systems can curate products in open-web settings. Specifically, they have limited coverage of shopping scenarios, focusing only on simplified single-platform lookups rather than exploratory search. Moreover, they overlook personalization in evaluation, leaving unclear whether agents can adapt to diverse user preferences in realistic shopping contexts. To address this gap, we present AgenticShop, the first benchmark for evaluating agentic systems on personalized product curation in open-web environment. Crucially, our approach features realistic shopping scenarios, diverse user profiles, and a verifiable, checklist-driven personalization evaluation framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that current agentic systems remain largely insufficient, emphasizing the need for user-side systems that effectively curate tailored products across the modern web.

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of optimized policies, suggesting that they fail to accurately assess the true capabilities of RMs. To bridge this gap, we explore several evaluation designs through the lens of reward overoptimization, i.e., a phenomenon that captures both how well the reward model aligns with human preferences and the dynamics of the learning signal it provides to the policy. The results highlight three key findings on how to construct a reliable benchmark: (i) it is important to minimize differences between chosen and rejected responses beyond correctness, (ii) evaluating reward models requires multiple comparisons across a wide range of chosen and rejected responses, and (iii) given that reward models encounter responses with diverse representations, responses should be sourced from a variety of models. However, we also observe that a extremely high correlation with degree of overoptimization leads to comparatively lower correlation with certain downstream performance. Thus, when designing a benchmark, it is desirable to use the degree of overoptimization as a useful tool, rather than the end goal.

The remarkable reasoning and generalization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for their expanding applications in embodied AI, robotics, and other real-world tasks. To effectively support these applications, grounding in spatial and temporal understanding in multimodal environments is essential. To this end, recent works have leveraged scene graphs, a structured representation that encodes entities, attributes, and their relationships in a scene. However, a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs’ ability to utilize scene graphs remains limited. In this work, we introduce Text-Scene Graph (TSG) Bench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess LLMs’ ability to (1) understand scene graphs and (2) generate them from textual narratives. With TSG Bench we evaluate 11 LLMs and reveal that, while models perform well on scene graph understanding, they struggle with scene graph generation, particularly for complex narratives. Our analysis indicates that these models fail to effectively decompose discrete scenes from a complex narrative, leading to a bottleneck when generating scene graphs. These findings underscore the need for improved methodologies in scene graph generation and provide valuable insights for future research. The demonstration of our benchmark is available at https://tsg-bench.netlify.app. Additionally, our code and evaluation data are publicly available at https://github.com/docworlds/tsg-bench.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained much attention in building autonomous agents. However, performance of current LLM-based web agents in long-horizon tasks is far from optimal, often yielding errors such as repeatedly buying a non-refundable flight ticket. By contrast, humans can avoid such an irreversible mistake, as we have an awareness of the potential outcomes (e.g., losing money) of our actions, also known as the "world model". Motivated by this, our study first starts with preliminary analyses, confirming the absence of world models in current LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, etc.). Then, we present a World-model-augmented (WMA) web agent, which simulates the outcomes of its actions for better decision-making. To overcome the challenges in training LLMs as world models predicting next observations, such as repeated elements across observations and long HTML inputs, we propose a transition-focused observation abstraction, where the prediction objectives are free-form natural language descriptions exclusively highlighting important state differences between time steps. Experiments on WebArena and Mind2Web show that our world models improve agents' policy selection without training and demonstrate our agents' cost- and time-efficiency compared to recent tree-search-based agents.

Dongjin Kang, Sunghwan Kim, Taeyoon Kwon, Seungjun Moon, Hyunsouk Cho, Youngjae Yu, Dongha Lee, Jinyoung Yeo. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Hyungjoo Chae, Yeonghyeon Kim, Seungone Kim, Kai Tzu-iunn Ong, Beong-woo Kwak, Moohyeon Kim, Sunghwan Kim, Taeyoon Kwon, Jiwan Chung, Youngjae Yu, Jinyoung Yeo. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.