Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.41435

BlindToChange: AI Agents Can Find Changes When Asked But Do They Look When Needed?

Anirudh Phukan·Tanya Goyal·Danish Pruthi
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Given that AI agents can search the web broadly and deeply in real time, it is tempting to conclude that their outputs account for recent world events. We show that this conclusion does not hold in practice. While agents can search and easily find recent changes, the correctness of their responses depends on whether they search and what they search for. Popular agentic search benchmarks like BrowseComp cannot expose failures wherein agents do not recognize their own assumptions that should be verified, since these benchmarks explicitly state what needs to be found. In contrast, many user requests state only the final information need (e.g., an itinerary for a trip), leaving the agent to discover relevant changes (e.g., the temporary closure of a museum) and account for their consequences. To highlight such gaps, we introduce BlindToChange, a benchmark that measures whether agents proactively discover recent events that affect their responses. Our benchmark comprises requests for recommendations where an obvious candidate is no longer applicable due to a recent real-world event. These events are drawn automatically from Wikidata, allowing BlindToChange to be periodically refreshed. Strikingly, we find a big gap -- as high as 27.5 points, even at high reasoning effort -- in systems' performance, when the recent event is not explicitly mentioned compared to when we ask about it directly. Analyzing search trajectories, we learn that more than half of the failures can be attributed to the fact that agents do not directly search to verify whether a relevant fact has changed. Our benchmark highlights, and tracks, a new axis of progress, wherein systems account for recent information that is not explicitly mentioned in the user request.

Explore related subjects

cs.CLcs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Anirudh Phukan, Tanya Goyal, Danish Pruthi. 2026-10-30. BlindToChange: AI Agents Can Find Changes When Asked But Do They Look When Needed?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41435

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Semantic Self-Consistency: Enhancing Language Model Reasoning via Semantic Weighting

While large language models (LLMs) have rapidly improved their performance on a broad number of tasks, they still often fall short on reasoning tasks. As LLMs become more integrated in diverse real-world tasks, advancing their reasoning capabilities is crucial to their effectiveness in nuanced, complex problems. Wang et al.'s self-consistency framework reveals that sampling multiple rationales before taking a majority vote reliably improves model performance across various closed-answer reasoning tasks. Standard methods based on this framework aggregate the final decisions of these rationales but fail to utilize the semantic information detailed in the step-by-step reasoning paths. Our work introduces semantic self-consistency, enhancing this approach by incorporating and analyzing both the reasoning paths of these rationales in addition to their final decisions before taking a majority vote. These methods not only improve the reliability of reasoning paths but also cause more robust performance on complex reasoning tasks.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Isolated Dots: Benchmarking Structured Table Construction as Deep Knowledge Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to extract and synthesize structured information from complex real-world documents, yet they typically produce unstructured, hard-to-verify paragraph-style outputs. We introduce AOE (Arranged and Organized Extraction), a bilingual benchmark that evaluates LLMs' ability to distill long-form, multi-document inputs (64k to 1.8M tokens) into structured tables. AOE comprises 12 tasks across four domains (academic, financial, legal, and medical), each grounded in genuine analytical needs, with schema guidance provided to isolate extraction quality from formatting variance. We evaluate 12 frontier LLMs (both open-weight and proprietary) under four generation settings of increasing autonomy: direct full-document input, RAG-based retrieval, offline document-browsing agent, and online web-search agent. Even the best-performing model achieves only 42.7% Cell F1, and retrieval-augmented approaches often degrade rather than improve performance, revealing that structured extraction from long contexts remains a fundamental challenge - an "Area of Effect" (AOE) that impacts all tested systems.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

PersonaFuse: A Situation-Aware Post-Training Framework for Adaptive LLM Behavior in Enterprise Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise settings to support task execution and workflow automation. Despite the strong performance of general-purpose models on standard benchmarks, organizations often need to adapt them to domain-specific tasks and operational constraints in practice. However, existing post-training approaches introduce capability trade-offs and lack mechanisms for situational adaptation. In this work, we propose PersonaFuse, a post-training framework that enables situation-aware behavioral adaptation in LLMs. Grounded in Trait Activation Theory and operationalized through the Five-Factor Model, PersonaFuse dynamically adjusts model behavior based on task context using a mixture-of-experts architecture with trait-level experts and a context-aware routing mechanism. We evaluate PersonaFuse at three levels. At the capability level, it achieves balanced improvements across general reasoning, interaction quality, and safety without introducing trade-offs. At the workflow level, it improves task completion in enterprise scenarios involving tool use and structured execution across both B2B and B2C tasks. At the deployment level, we analyze model selection under cost and safety constraints using a capability-cost frontier framework, showing that models adapted with PersonaFuse achieve more favorable trade-offs and are consistently selected as optimal across deployment scenarios. PersonaFuse provides a practical framework for developing LLMs that are not only capable, but also adaptable and deployable in real-world enterprise environments.

cs.CL↗