AI & ML
UserArena: Benchmarking Interactive User Simulation for Long-Horizon Shopping Agents
arXiv cs.IR0 views
arXiv:2610.30932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic recommendation pursues shopper goals through sequences of context-dependent decisions. Developing and evaluating such policies requires faithful recommendation world models that capture both the interactive shopping environment and users' behavioral responses over long interactions. Existing resources rarely provide long-horizon, fine-grained real-user trajectories or support trajectory-level evaluation and offline validation against production A/B results. We introduce UserArena, a real-world e-commerce interactive benchmark containing 64,729 session trajectories from 11,010 users, spanning 566,102 items and 13 action types. UserArena pairs these trajectories with an interactive environment and supports offline validation against outcomes from a controlled production A/B test, enabling five-level evaluation from output validity and local decisions to sequential behavior, personalization, and outcomes. To improve simulator fidelity over these long-horizon interactions, we further propose On-Policy Trajectory Distillation (OPTD), which uses trajectory-level intent to provide dense teacher targets on student-generated rollouts. Experiments show that OPTD achieves the strongest overall fidelity among the evaluated simulators under UserArena's evaluation protocol and most closely reproduces the production policy effect in offline simulation.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30932PreviousBezier-Guided Adaptive Flow for Cross-domain Sequential RecommendationNextPAIR: Preference-Aligned Intent Retrieval for Premium People Recommendation at LinkedIn
Related posts
I Launched My Company Website, Made Task Monitor Free, and Opened Custom Project Requests
0dev.to AI
How I turn Hacker News, GitHub and npm into product ideas every 3 hours
0dev.to AI
Lenovo's 'Encrypted' Fingerprint USB Drive Is an SD Card. How to Check Yours
0dev.to Linux

Email: OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work tabs on desktop, rolling out to select users before a wider release; Codex remains a separate experience (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
0Techmeme

Memo: Alphabet is issuing €6B in euro-denominated debt across seven tranches, attracting €17B+ of demand; the company sold €9B of bonds earlier in 2026 (Reuters)
0Techmeme

S-1: Anthropic reports Q3 revenue up 12x YoY to nearly $17B, a net loss of $23.3B, up from $12.1B in Q3 2025, and operating expenses up 292% to $17.5B (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)
0Techmeme