Lost in the Request: How Communication Variation Disrupts Retrieval and Action in Email Agents
An email assistant should not complete less work simply because a user phrases the same request differently. Yet most benchmarks test each task with only one canonical request, leaving this form of robustness largely unmeasured. We test whether email assistants remain reliable when the requested information, available evidence, and expected outcome stay fixed, but the communication style or English variety changes. We construct validated variants along five communication-style axes and four rule-based dialect conditions, and evaluate them on three benchmarks: a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline and two tool-using agents. Indirect requests reduce performance on all three benchm...
| Authors | Feng Chen, Ritam Dutt, Atnaz Taheri et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 2 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 October 2026 |
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