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Ask Now, Use Later: Benchmarking the Proactivity Gap in Long-Lived LLM Agents

Bin Wu, Guanyun Zou, Bingbing Wang, Huan Zhao, Chuan Shi · May 27, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics Law Pairwise Preference
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How to use this page

High trust

Use this as a practical starting point for protocol research, then validate against the original paper.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

High

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request. Yet today's agents keep what a user volunteers but rarely ask for what stays unspoken, leaving a proactivity gap in long-lived LLM agents: an agent cannot act on a preference it never obtained. As users delegate more of their affairs to agents, the impact of this gap grows. We isolate one concrete, controllable slice of this gap as Ask-to-Remember (ATR): the agent decides whether to ask now for a reusable user preference that the current task does not need but a later session with the same user will. ATR is hard even to evaluate: the right question is underdetermined and its payoff deferred to tasks that may never arise. ATRBench, to the best of our knowledge the first ATR benchmark, makes it measurable by fixing each user's preferences as hidden ground truth, so success demands asking, not recall. Across eight frontier LLM agents, defaults fall at least 62 points below an oracle handed the relevant preference, and prompting closes little of it. Diagnostics identify acquisition as the bottleneck. ATRBench surfaces this proactivity gap in current agents and offers a diagnostic testbed for closing it.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

High

Usefulness score

65/100 • Medium

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

Human Feedback Signal

Detected

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Moderate-confidence candidate

Extraction confidence 80%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Pairwise Preference

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

Atrbench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"ATRBench, to the best of our knowledge the first ATR benchmark, makes it measurable by fixing each user's preferences as hidden ground truth, so success demands asking, not recall."

Reported Metrics

strong

Recall

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"ATRBench, to the best of our knowledge the first ATR benchmark, makes it measurable by fixing each user's preferences as hidden ground truth, so success demands asking, not recall."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: Yes
  • Feedback types: Pairwise Preference
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: High
  • Use this page as: Secondary protocol comparison source

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

Atrbench

Reported Metrics

recall

Research Brief

Metadata summary

A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request.
  • Yet today's agents keep what a user volunteers but rarely ask for what stays unspoken, leaving a proactivity gap in long-lived LLM agents: an agent cannot act on a preference it never obtained.
  • As users delegate more of their affairs to agents, the impact of this gap grows.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request.
  • Yet today's agents keep what a user volunteers but rarely ask for what stays unspoken, leaving a proactivity gap in long-lived LLM agents: an agent cannot act on a preference it never obtained.
  • As users delegate more of their affairs to agents, the impact of this gap grows.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • A long-lived LLM agent, such as OpenClaw, earns its value by acting on a user's preferences and constraints across sessions, not just the current request.
  • Yet today's agents keep what a user volunteers but rarely ask for what stays unspoken, leaving a proactivity gap in long-lived LLM agents: an agent cannot act on a preference it never obtained.

Researcher Checklist

  • Pass: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Pairwise Preference

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Atrbench

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: recall

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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