Kai Wang

Junle Chen, Wei Chen, Yehong Xu et al.

Interactive travel planning has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are deployed to manage evolving preferences and unexpected disruptions over multiple turns. Such settings require models to make complex, profile-conditioned planning decisions. However, existing benchmarks often evaluate feasibility, personalization, or interaction in relatively isolated settings. We therefore introduce Trip+ to measure the ability of agents to plan travel holistically. In Trip+, given traveler profiles and dynamic interactions, agents must generate and revise minute-level itineraries. End-to-end traveler experiences are evaluated via an LLM-based simulator, enabling the assessment of subjective metrics like fatigue. Our scenarios range from simple request resolutions to complex environment-driven replanning. We evaluate 18 LMs and find a consistent gap in experiential quality. Models favor technically feasible but exhausting itineraries that diverge sharply from profiled traveler preferences.

Kai Wang, Moin Hussian Moti, Dimitris Papadias

Indexes for large collections of intervals are common in temporal databases, where each record has a lifespan, or validity interval. Despite their conceptual differences, we demonstrate that interval indexes can be captured by some corner structure in a 2D space. This representation facilitates the optimization of query processing by identifying nodes that must contain query results versus nodes that may contain results. In addition, we explore the assumption that intervals arrive in order of increasing ending time (IET) to develop disk-based indexes that have compact size, efficient insertions, and fast query processing. Specifically, we first develop CEB, an index in the corner space defined by the interval center and endpoint. Our second contribution is TIDE, which organizes intervals by their duration and endpoint. CEB and TIDE adopt a two-layer architecture, where the leaf nodes of a top tree (ordering intervals by their center or duration) correspond to the root nodes of bottom trees, ordering intervals by their endpoints. Both top and bottom trees are append-only B+-trees to facilitate fast insertions. CEB and TIDE outperform state-of-the-art competitors in terms of index size and insertion speed. In addition, TIDE is always faster in query processing, sometimes by orders of magnitude.