Papers for
business automation teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Trust alone does not ensure better deals in repeated AI negotiations
Knowing Whom to Trust is not Enough: The Trust--Agreement Gap in Repeated Multi-Party LLM Negotiation
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly participate in negotiations on behalf of individuals and organizations, yet they remain vulnerable to manipulation, particularly in repeated multi-party interactions. Classical multi-agent systems address this challenge through explicit trust and reputation models, whereas existing work on LLM negotiation largely treats trust as an emergent phenomenon. We investigate whether LLM agents can form useful trust estimates from prior interactions and leverage them to improve future negotiation outcomes. We introduce a repeated, multi-party, multi-issue negotiation framework in which recurring agents participate in a sequence of negotiation games while one participant covertly attempts to prevent agreement. After each game, agents assess their counterparts and maintain pairwise trust estimates that carry over to subsequent negotiations. We compare trust-aware and trust-agnostic agents and analyze how explicit trust influences negotiation outcomes. Our results reveal a \emph{trust--agreement gap}: trust-aware agents can identify the adversary within a few games, but accurate trust estimates do not consistently translate into better agreements. Trust increases agreement rates by up to 23 percentage points, but only when agents are explicitly guided to use it in their decisions. Explicit trust can therefore improve repeated LLM negotiations, but its value depends critically on how trust is assessed and incorporated into agents' reasoning.
BizBench reveals hidden challenges for AI in complex business tasks
BizBench: Unveiling Hidden Challenges in Deploying Long-Horizon Agents for Real-World Business
Abstract: Existing long-horizon agent benchmarks often emphasize final task success while providing limited assessment of intermediate execution validity. Yet real-world business operations require agents to navigate extensive, potentially outdated or conflicting policies while satisfying critical constraints throughout execution. These requirements are particularly consequential in high-stakes domains such as payments, where intermediate violations can incur financial losses or regulatory consequences regardless of the final outcome. To bridge this evaluation gap, we introduce BizBench, a multi-turn benchmark grounded in real-world procedures from a leading payments company. Its executable environment integrates 789 knowledge documents and 601 discoverable business tools, with consistent policies, states, and tool behavior. The benchmark comprises 50 tasks involving resource constraints, temporal dependencies, prior commitments, and conflicting or outdated guidance. Each task is validated through reference execution, while deterministic checks assess both goal attainment and execution validity without prescribing a single solution path. Experiments reveal substantial limitations even among frontier models: Claude Opus 5 and GPT-6 Sol achieve strict success rates of only 64.0% and 61.3%, respectively. For Qwen3.8-27B, goal attainment reaches 42.0%, but strict success drops to 32.7%, demonstrating how outcome-based evaluation can mask invalid execution. Beyond success rates, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash averages 191.3 tool calls per run, approximately 70% more than reference executions, revealing substantial execution overhead. Overall, BizBench establishes a testbed for evaluating and advancing long-horizon agents beyond task completion, toward reliable and constraint-compliant execution in complex business environments.
MapFlow speeds up large language model use by reusing attention patterns
Accelerating Cross-Model LLM Inference via Attention Map Reuse
Abstract: LLM-augmented data workflows often involve multiple heterogeneous models operating over substantial shared context, such as schemas, tool specifications, interaction history, and intermediate results. Although prefix caching can reduce prefilling overhead, existing approaches are largely limited to reuse within the same model because KV states are tightly coupled to model-specific architectures. We present MapFlow, a system for efficient heterogeneous LLM serving via cross-model attention map reuse. Instead of reusing KV states, MapFlow reuses attention maps, which capture token dependency patterns and are more transferable across models. To enable efficient and accurate reuse, we combine partial recomputation with lightweight linear translation across layers and heads. To make attention reuse practical for long contexts, we further introduce block-level sparse compression and a fused retrieval kernel. Experiments show that MapFlow reduces prefilling latency and improves end-to-end serving efficiency while preserving generation quality across heterogeneous model pairs and multi-turn routing workloads. These results suggest that attention maps provide an effective reusable state for heterogeneous LLM serving, especially in prefix-heavy data workflows. Our code is available: https://github.com/PKU-DAIR/MapFlow.