A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis
Izzeddin Gur, Hiroki Furuta, Austin V Huang, Mustafa Safdari, Yutaka Matsuo, Douglas Eck, Aleksandra Faust
Abstract
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved better generalization and sample efficiency in autonomous web automation. However, the performance on real-world websites has still suffered from (1) open domainness, (2) limited context length, and (3) lack of inductive bias on HTML. We introduce WebAgent, an LLM-driven agent that learns from self-experience to complete tasks on real websites following natural language instructions. WebAgent plans ahead by decomposing instructions into canonical sub-instructions, summarizes long HTML documents into task-relevant snippets, and acts on websites via Python programs generated from those. We design WebAgent with Flan-U-PaLM, for grounded code generation, and HTML-T5, new pre-trained LLMs for long HTML documents using local and global attention mechanisms and a mixture of long-span denoising objectives, for planning and summarization. We empirically demonstrate that our modular recipe improves the success on real websites by over 50%, and that HTML-T5 is the best model to solve various HTML understanding tasks; achieving 18.7% higher success rate than the prior method on MiniWoB web automation benchmark, and SoTA performance on Mind2Web, an offline task planning evaluation.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
gur2024a,
title={A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis},
author={Izzeddin Gur and Hiroki Furuta and Austin V Huang and Mustafa Safdari and Yutaka Matsuo and Douglas Eck and Aleksandra Faust},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=9JQtrumvg8}
}