# WebRobot: Web Robotic Process Automation using Interactive Programming-by-Demonstration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09993 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09993/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Anti-unification and Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00277/) (2023)
- [DiLogics: Creating Web Automation Programs With Diverse Logics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05828/) (2023)
- [AI2T: Building Trustable AI Tutors by Interactively Teaching a Self-Aware Learning Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17924/) (2024)
- [ImageEye: Batch Image Processing Using Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03253/) (2023)
- [Efficient Bottom-Up Synthesis for Programs with Local Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03705/) (2023)
- [InterPReT: Interactive Policy Restructuring and Training Enable Effective Imitation Learning from Laypersons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04213/) (2026)
- [EchoPath: Execution-Level Replayable Memory for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16635/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is imperative to democratize robotic process automation (RPA), as RPA has become a main driver of the digital transformation but is still technically very demanding to construct, especially for non-experts. In this paper, we study how to automate an important class of RPA tasks, dubbed web RPA, which are concerned with constructing software bots that automate interactions across data and a web browser. Our main contributions are twofold. First, we develop a formal foundation which allows semantically reasoning about web RPA programs and formulate its synthesis problem in a principled manner. Second, we propose a web RPA program synthesis algorithm based on a new idea called speculative rewriting. This leads to a novel speculate-and-validate methodology in the context of rewrite-based program synthesis, which has also shown to be both theoretically simple and practically efficient for synthesizing programs from demonstrations. We have built these ideas in a new interactive synthesizer called WebRobot and evaluate it on 76 web RPA benchmarks. Our results show that WebRobot automated a majority of them effectively. Furthermore, we show that WebRobot compares favorably with a conventional rewrite-based synthesis baseline implemented using egg. Finally, we conduct a small user study demonstrating WebRobot is also usable.