When Users Change Their Mind: Evaluating Interruptible Agents in Long-Horizon Web Navigation
Authors: Henry Peng Zou, Chunyu Miao, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yankai Chen, Yue Zhou, Hanrong Zhang, Yaozu Wu, Liancheng Fang, Zhengyao Gu, Zhen Zhang, Kening Zheng, Fangxin Wang, Yi Nian, Shanghao Li, Wenzhe Fan, Langzhou He, Weizhi Zhang, Xue Liu, Philip S. Yu
Organizations: University of Illinois Chicago · McGill University · MBZUAI · University of California Santa Barbara · University of Southern California
As LLM agents transition from short, static problem solving to executing complex, long-horizon tasks in dynamic environments, the ability to handle user interruptions, such as adding requirement or revising goals, during mid-task execution is becoming a core requirement for realistic deployment. However, existing benchmarks largely assume uninterrupted agent behavior or study interruptions only in short, unconstrained language tasks. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of interruptible agents in long-horizon, environmentally grounded web navigation tasks, where actions induce persistent state changes. We formalize three realistic interruption types, including addition, revision, and retraction, and introduce InterruptBench, a benchmark derived from WebArena-Lite that synthesizes high-quality interruption scenarios under strict semantic constraints. Using a unified interruption simulation framework, we evaluate six strong LLM backbones across single- and multi-turn interruption settings, analyzing both their effectiveness in adapting to updated intents and their efficiency in recovering from mid-task changes. Our results show that handling user interruptions effectively and efficiently during long-horizon agentic tasks remains challenging for powerful large-scale LLMs. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/InterruptBench.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: InterruptBench setup and evaluation . We evaluate an agent operating in the WebArena environment under user-driven interruptions at dynamic timesteps, where the user may update, revise, or retract parts of the original request.
Figure 2: Budget-limited success rate as a function of post-interruption action budget k across three interruption scenarios. Solid lines denote runs that receive mid-task interruption updates, while dashed lines represent matched no-interruption runs that do not receive updates but are evaluated against the final intent, serving as a lower-bound reference for no-update behavior under the same budget.
Figure 3: Post-update success curves SRm(k∣n) for n∈{1,2,3} interruptions, aligned at the latest update (so k counts actions after the final interruption). Stage1/2/3 correspond to n=1/2/3 . The figure shows how additional updates shift success upward under a fixed post-update budget, with diminishing returns as curves approach a model-specific plateau.
Model
0 int.
1 int.
2 int.
3 int.
Claude-Haiku-4.5
5.45
19.39
33.33
38.79
Claude-Sonnet-4.5
4.24
15.15
33.33
41.21
Claude-Opus-4.5
5.45
21.21
36.36
41.82
Qwen3-235B-A22B
4.24
11.52
18.79
23.64
DeepSeek-V3.1
4.85
12.12
21.21
20.61
Mistral-Large-3
3.03
11.52
12.73
13.94
Table 2: Converged performance under multiple interruption updates. Success rates under n∈{0,1,2,3} interruptions (more interruptions correspond to more user-provided information).
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure F.1: User interruption with additional intent in WebArena. The agent initially plans a walking vs. driving comparison from Pittsburgh Downtown → Carnegie Mellon University, but a mid-trajectory user interrupt adds a new constraint (start from Randyland); we contrast an error trace that fails to fully retract/update the plan with a correct trace that revises the origin, recomputes routes, and returns the updated time difference.
Existing web agent benchmarks have largely converged on short, single-site tasks that frontier models are approaching saturation on. However, real world web use consists of long-horizon, multi-site workflows. Common web navigation tasks, such as comparing products across different domains, planning trips across multiple services, or summarizing information from multiple search queries, require sustained context and cross-site reasoning over potentially hours of browsing. To capture and evaluate such behaviors, we introduce Odysseys: a benchmark of 200 long-horizon web tasks derived from real world browsing sessions evaluated on the live Internet. We find that binary pass/fail evaluation is inadequate for long-horizon settings and introduce a rubric-based evaluation, annotating each Odysseys task with an average of 6.1 graded rubrics. We demonstrate that this yields higher agreement with humans and provides a more fine-grained signal than commonly used trajectory-level LLM-as-a-judge evaluation metrics. We tested several leading frontier models and find that the strongest models achieve a success rate of 44.5%, which leaves substantial room for future improvements. Beyond task success, we argue that efficiency is a first-class concern for long-horizon agents. We introduce a Trajectory Efficiency metric (rubric score per step) and find that even frontier agents achieve only 1.15%, marking an evident need for agents that can succeed efficiently and not simply eventually. Odysseys isolates the critical evaluation of long-horizon proficiency in open-web environments, providing a realistic benchmark to measure progress towards computer-use agents that can potentially productively operate for hours. We release our tasks, evaluation scripts, and other results at https://odysseys-website.pages.dev
Lawrence Keunho Jang, Jing Yu Koh, Daniel Fried +1
Large language model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as powerful autonomous controllers for digital environments, including mobile interfaces, operating systems, and web browsers. Web navigation, for example, requires handling dynamic content and long sequences of actions, making it particularly challenging. Existing LLM-based agents struggle with long-horizon planning in two main ways. During online execution, they often lose track as new information arrives, lacking a clear and adaptive path toward the final goal. This issue is further exacerbated during reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning, where sparse and delayed rewards make it difficult for agents to identify which actions lead to success, preventing them from maintaining coherent reasoning over extended tasks. To address these challenges, we propose two contributions. First, we introduce an agent framework that leverages proprietary models for online planning through subgoal decomposition. Second, we present MiRA (Milestoning your Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Agent), an RL training framework that uses dense, milestone-based reward signals. The real-time planning mechanism improves proprietary models such as Gemini by approximately a 10% absolute increase in success rate (SR) on the WebArena-Lite benchmark. Meanwhile, applying MiRA to the open Gemma3-12B model increases its success rate from 6.4% to 43.0%. This performance surpasses proprietary systems such as GPT-4-Turbo (17.6%) and GPT-4o (13.9%), as well as the previous open-model state of the art, WebRL (38.4%). Overall, our findings demonstrate that combining explicit inference-time planning with milestone-based rewards significantly improves an agent's long-horizon capabilities, paving the way for more robust and general-purpose autonomous systems.
Existing LLM-based web agents struggle on complex, long-horizon tasks due to limited in-context memory, weak planning abilities, and greedy behaviors that lead to premature termination. To address these challenges, we propose \SA{}, a hierarchical planning framework that interleaves planning and execution via dynamic \ANDOR trees. The framework separates structural planning from LLM-based reasoning, enabling principled error recovery through node repair, systematic exploration of alternatives via OR nodes, and modular plans that can facilitate human intervention. On WebArena (630 tasks), \SA{} achieves a ∼53% success rate vs.\ ∼46% for AgentOccam, and on complex multi-constraint Amazon shopping tasks, gains reach 10% over the strongest baseline.
ELita Lobo, Xu Chen, Jingjing Meng +5
University of Massachusetts Amherst · Amazon · Virginia Commonwealth University +1