Benchmarking In-context Experiential Learning Through Repeated Product Recommendations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Gilbert, Chen, Yaqin, Yen, Thomson, Namkoong, Hongseok
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yang, Gilbert
Chen, Yaqin
Yen, Thomson
Namkoong, Hongseok
author_facet Yang, Gilbert
Chen, Yaqin
Yen, Thomson
Namkoong, Hongseok
contents To reliably navigate ever-shifting real-world environments, agents must grapple with incomplete knowledge and adapt their behavior through experience. However, current evaluations largely focus on tasks that leave no ambiguity, and do not measure agents' ability to adaptively learn and reason through the experiences they accrued. We exemplify the need for this in-context experiential learning in a product recommendation context, where agents must navigate shifting customer preferences and product landscapes through natural language dialogue. We curate a benchmark for experiential learning and active exploration (BELA) that combines (1) rich real-world products from Amazon, (2) a diverse collection of user personas to represent heterogeneous yet latent preferences, and (3) a LLM user simulator powered by the persona to create rich interactive trajectories. We observe that current frontier models struggle to meaningfully improve across episodes, underscoring the need for agentic systems with strong in-context learning capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_22130
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking In-context Experiential Learning Through Repeated Product Recommendations
Yang, Gilbert
Chen, Yaqin
Yen, Thomson
Namkoong, Hongseok
Machine Learning
To reliably navigate ever-shifting real-world environments, agents must grapple with incomplete knowledge and adapt their behavior through experience. However, current evaluations largely focus on tasks that leave no ambiguity, and do not measure agents' ability to adaptively learn and reason through the experiences they accrued. We exemplify the need for this in-context experiential learning in a product recommendation context, where agents must navigate shifting customer preferences and product landscapes through natural language dialogue. We curate a benchmark for experiential learning and active exploration (BELA) that combines (1) rich real-world products from Amazon, (2) a diverse collection of user personas to represent heterogeneous yet latent preferences, and (3) a LLM user simulator powered by the persona to create rich interactive trajectories. We observe that current frontier models struggle to meaningfully improve across episodes, underscoring the need for agentic systems with strong in-context learning capabilities.
title Benchmarking In-context Experiential Learning Through Repeated Product Recommendations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22130