# When Users Change Their Mind: Evaluating Interruptible Agents in Long-Horizon Web Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00892 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00892/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 34 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07982/) (2025)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05243/) (2024)
- [OmniParser for Pure Vision Based GUI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00203/) (2024)
- [Plan-and-Act: Improving Planning of Agents for Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09572/) (2025)
- [Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03568/) (2024)
- [WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16421/) (2025)
- [CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00640/) (2025)
- [xbench: Tracking Agents Productivity Scaling with Profession-Aligned Real-World Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13651/) (2025)
- [AgentOccam: A Simple Yet Strong Baseline for LLM-Based Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13825/) (2024)
- [From CLIP to DINO: Visual Encoders Shout in Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08825/) (2023)
- [Modeling Future Conversation Turns to Teach LLMs to Ask Clarifying Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13788/) (2024)
- [UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22034/) (2025)
- [Collaborative Gym: A Framework for Enabling and Evaluating Human-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15701/) (2024)
- [Scaling Test-time Compute for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12928/) (2025)
- [ExACT: Teaching AI Agents to Explore with Reflective-MCTS and Exploratory Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02052/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Agent Memory in the Second Half: Towards Self-Evolving and Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06052/) (2026)
- [Large Language Model-based Human-Agent Collaboration for Complex Task Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12914/) (2024)
- [Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06576/) (2025)
- [RECODE-H: A Benchmark for Research Code Development with Interactive Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06186/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Systems with Large Language Models: A Survey of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16804/) (2025)
- [Interactive Speculative Planning: Enhance Agent Efficiency through Co-design of System and User Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00079/) (2024)
- [FocusAgent: Simple Yet Effective Ways of Trimming the Large Context of Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03204/) (2025)
- [HiPlan: Hierarchical Planning for LLM-Based Agents with Adaptive Global-Local Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19076/) (2025)
- [WebOperator: Action-Aware Tree Search for Autonomous Agents in Web Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12692/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01687/) (2026)
- [GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12285/) (2026)
- [AtelierEval: Agentic Evaluation of Humans & LLMs as Text-to-Image Prompters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22645/) (2026)
- [RSIAgent: Autonomous Exploration for Recursive Self-improvement in New Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15364/) (2026)
- [Will the Agent Recuse, and Will It Stop? Measuring LLM-Agent Compliance with In-Band Governance Signals at the Access Door and Mid-Flight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06460/) (2026)
- [AutoCRAT: Within-trajectory Joint Control of Stochasticity and Compute for LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29988/) (2026)
- [HAS-Bench: Evaluating LLM-Based Human-Agent Systems under Configurable Human Participation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04329/) (2026)
- [Beyond Oracle Communication: Benchmarking Interactive Intent Alignment Under Miscommunication and Evolving User Intent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38604/) (2026)
- [Securing Computer-Use Agents: A Unified Architecture-Lifecycle Framework for Deployment-Grounded Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07110/) (2026)
- [REDDIT: Forgetting-Resistant Correction of Timestamp Drift in ASR via Replay-Based Distribution Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05364/) (2026)
- [A Unified Evaluation Framework for Trustworthy Large Language Models, Agentic AI, and Multimodal Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19524/) (2026)
- [When Users Change Their Minds: Measuring and Repairing Intent Drift in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32520/) (2026)
- [Commitment Hierarchies under Intent Revision: A Belief-Revision Account of Salvage in Tool-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37453/) (2026)
- [MAGMA-Bench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Embodied Agents under Dynamic Tasks and Execution Failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13534/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.