BehaviorBench: Modeling Real-World User Decisions from Behavioral Traces
Abstract
Many decision-support systems require adapting to individual users, yet evaluating this capability remains challenging because user preferences and beliefs are rarely stated explicitly. Instead, they are revealed through sequences of real-world behavior. Existing benchmarks for user understanding often rely on textual personas, constructed preferences, or simulated users, which may not faithfully reflect how people actually decide.We introduce BehaviorBench, a benchmark for modeling user decisions from real-world behavioral traces. Built from public prediction-market and on-chain records, the benchmark reconstructs longitudinal decision histories and evaluates whether models can infer how a particular user believes and acts from prior behavior. It defines two complementary task layers: Belief prediction, which infers a user's final revealed stance and confidence, and Trade prediction, which predicts the direction and magnitude of individual actions. We evaluate frontier and open-weight generative models under multiple history representations, including direct behavioral history, generated user profiles, and retrieved cross-user evidence. Results show that personalization is not a single capability: models benefit differently from different representations depending on the task, and performance remains limited when reasoning over implicit behavioral signals. BehaviorBench provides an evaluation setting for studying personalized decision modeling grounded in real-world behavioral evidence rather than simulated users alone.
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