arXiv — Machine Learning · · 3 min read

AdaptArena: Evaluating Test-Time Personalization of Web Agents

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2609.36488 (cs)
[Submitted on 29 Sep 2026]

Title:AdaptArena: Evaluating Test-Time Personalization of Web Agents

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Abstract:Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong performance on complex web navigation tasks, yet they remain brittle in real-world settings where user intentions are underspecified and preferences are heterogeneous. In practice, users rarely provide explicit profiles, requiring agents to infer latent preferences from implicit signals. Despite its importance for deployment, this problem setting is largely underexplored in existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce AdaptArena, a benchmark for evaluating test-time personalization of web agents via implicit preference inference. AdaptArena consists of 480 tasks, featuring both single-preference and double-preference scenarios. Each evaluation task must be solved by retrieving and leveraging the most relevant historical user trajectory that implicitly encodes the target preference. In addition, we introduce AdaptiveAgent, a retrieval-based framework for standardized evaluation of implicit preference inference. Experiments reveal a substantial performance gap: while oracle agents with access to ground-truth preferences achieve an 82.92% success rate, the evaluated LLM agents using our framework reach at most 15.62%. Furthermore, we find that correctly inferring user preferences is necessary but not sufficient for task success, as execution failures in downstream web interactions remain a significant bottleneck even when agents align with the target preference. These findings highlight implicit preference inference and robust action grounding as key challenges for deploying reliable, user-facing web agents. We release our code: this https URL
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.36488 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2609.36488v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.36488
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Dongchan Shin [view email]
[v1] Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:46:48 UTC (2,593 KB)
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