# FLIN: A Flexible Natural Language Interface for Web Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12844 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12844/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12856/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18279/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11854/) (2023)
- [META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11029/) (2022)
- [On the Multi-turn Instruction Following for Conversational Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15057/) (2024)
- [RiOSWorld: Benchmarking the Risk of Multimodal Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00618/) (2025)
- [WebVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation on Websites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15820/) (2023)
- [Lexi: Self-Supervised Learning of the UI Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10165/) (2023)
- [NaviQAte: Functionality-Guided Web Application Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10741/) (2024)
- [V2P: Visual Attention Calibration for GUI Grounding via Background Suppression and Center Peaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13634/) (2025)
- [Steward: Natural Language Web Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15441/) (2024)
- [PAFFA: Premeditated Actions For Fast Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07958/) (2024)
- [Detecting Pipeline Failures through Fine-Grained Analysis of Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14382/) (2025)
- [V2P: Visual Attention Calibration for GUI Grounding via Background Suppression and Center Peaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06899/) (2026)
- [StepGuard: Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17871/) (2026)
- [Act2Intention: A Benchmark For Developing Active Mobile Agents Through Inferring User Intention from GUI Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14132/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI assistants can now carry out tasks for users by directly interacting with website UIs. Current semantic parsing and slot-filling techniques cannot flexibly adapt to many different websites without being constantly re-trained. We propose FLIN, a natural language interface for web navigation that maps user commands to concept-level actions (rather than low-level UI actions), thus being able to flexibly adapt to different websites and handle their transient nature. We frame this as a ranking problem: given a user command and a webpage, FLIN learns to score the most relevant navigation instruction (involving action and parameter values). To train and evaluate FLIN, we collect a dataset using nine popular websites from three domains. Our results show that FLIN was able to adapt to new websites in a given domain.