Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
Existing benchmarks rarely test this deployment pattern directly; they measure whether an agent can complete a task, not whether a long, binding policy document actually constrains its behavior over an extended tool-use horizon. We present this http URL, a benchmark of 65 agentic tasks modeled on how enterprise employees follow company handbooks. Tasks span five domains (finance, medical billing, insurance, logistics, and HR) and ten fictional companies.
- ▪Existing benchmarks rarely test this deployment pattern directly; they measure whether an agent can complete a task, not whether a long, binding policy document actually constrains its behavior over an extended tool-use horizon.
- ▪We present this http URL, a benchmark of 65 agentic tasks modeled on how enterprise employees follow company handbooks.
- ▪Tasks span five domains (finance, medical billing, insurance, logistics, and HR) and ten fictional companies.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 752 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | arXiv.org |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25398 |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:01:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T13:28:03.701Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T13:28:03.701Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wo7n3oH5P9wb · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2607.25398 (cs) [Submitted on 28 Jul 2026] Title:HANDBOOK.md: A Benchmark for Long-Context Agentic Instruction Following Authors:Liudas Panavas, Sebastian Minus, Bradley Monton, Derek Ray, Suhaas Garre, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen View a PDF of the paper titled HANDBOOK.md: A Benchmark for Long-Context Agentic Instruction Following, by Liudas Panavas and 6 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Language-model agents are increasingly deployed under standing instructions: a system prompt, a policy file, or a skills document is placed in context, and the agent is trusted to let it govern every action that follows.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv.org.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from arXiv.org
