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cs.CL updates on arXiv.org

Playing Along: Learning a Double-Agent Defender for Belief Steering via Theory of Mind RPA-Check: A Multi-Stage Automated Framework for Evaluating Dynamic LLM-based Role-Playing Agents A Triadic Suffix Tokenization Scheme for Numerical Reasoning Hidden Measurement Error in LLM Pipelines Distorts Annotation, Evaluation, and Benchmarking Synthius-Mem: Brain-Inspired Hallucination-Resistant Persona Memory Achieving 94.4% Memory Accuracy and 99.6% Adversarial Robustness on LoCoMo Time is Not a Label: Continuous Phase Rotation for Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Agentic Memory NovBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Academic Paper Novelty Assessment Policy Split: Incentivizing Dual-Mode Exploration in LLM Reinforcement with Dual-Mode Entropy Regularization METER: Evaluating Multi-Level Contextual Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models Think Before you Write: QA-Guided Reasoning for Character Descriptions in Books METRO: Towards Strategy Induction from Expert Dialogue Transcripts for Non-collaborative Dialogues Retrieval as Generation: A Unified Framework with Self-Triggered Information Planning Do LLMs Know Tool Irrelevance? Demystifying Structural Alignment Bias in Tool Invocations Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Models for Ancient Chinese Character Evolution Analysis via Glyph-Driven Fine-Tuning Polyglot Teachers: Evaluating Language Models for Multilingual Synthetic Data Generation Exploring Knowledge Conflicts for Faithful LLM Reasoning: Benchmark and Method CocoaBench: Evaluating Unified Digital Agents in the Wild MathAgent: Adversarial Evolution of Constraint Graphs for Mathematical Reasoning Data Synthesis Evaluating Memory Capability in Continuous Lifelog Scenario How Robust Are Large Language Models for Clinical Numeracy? An Empirical Study on Numerical Reasoning Abilities in Clinical Contexts Efficient Training for Cross-lingual Speech Language Models Shared Emotion Geometry Across Small Language Models: A Cross-Architecture Study of Representation, Behavior, and Methodological Confounds A Systematic Analysis of the Impact of Persona Steering on LLM Capabilities Uncertainty-Aware Web-Conditioned Scientific Fact-Checking When Valid Signals Fail: Regime Boundaries Between LLM Features and RL Trading Policies When Verification Fails: How Compositionally Infeasible Claims Escape Rejection Mem$^2$Evolve: Towards Self-Evolving Agents via Co-Evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation AOP-Smart: A RAG-Enhanced Large Language Model Framework for Adverse Outcome Pathway Analysis OccuBench: Evaluating AI Agents on Real-World Professional Tasks via Language Environment Simulation Advancing Polish Language Modeling through Tokenizer Optimization in the Bielik v3 7B and 11B Series
MCP vs RAG vs NLWeb vs HTML: A Comparison of the Effectiv...
Aaron Steiner, Ralph Peeters, Christian Bizer · 2025-11-28 · via cs.CL updates on arXiv.org

Large language model agents are increasingly used to automate web tasks such as product search, offer comparison, and checkout. Current research explores different interfaces through which these agents interact with websites, including traditional HTML browsing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over pre-crawled content, communication via Web APIs using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and natural-language querying through the NLWeb interface. However, no prior work has compared these four architectures within a single controlled environment using identical tasks. To address this gap, we introduce a testbed consisting of four simulated e-shops, each offering its products via HTML, MCP, and NLWeb interfaces. For each interface (HTML, RAG, MCP, and NLWeb) we develop specialized agents that perform the same sets of tasks, ranging from simple product searches and price comparisons to complex queries for complementary or substitute products and checkout processes. We evaluate the agents using GPT 4.1, GPT 5, GPT 5 mini, and Claude Sonnet 4 as underlying LLM. Our evaluation shows that the RAG, MCP and NLWeb agents outperform HTML on both effectiveness and efficiency. Averaged over all tasks, F1 rises from 0.67 for HTML to between 0.75 and 0.77 for the other agents. Token usage falls from about 241k for HTML to between 47k and 140k per task. The runtime per task drops from 291 seconds to between 50 and 62 seconds. The best overall configuration is RAG with GPT 5 achieving an F1 score of 0.87 and a completion rate of 0.79. Also taking cost into consideration, RAG with GPT 5 mini offers a good compromise between API usage fees and performance. Our experiments show the choice of the interaction interface has a substantial impact on both the effectiveness and efficiency of LLM-based web agents.