mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation

arXiv 2305.14257 ↗First posted 23 May 2023cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 36

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 25 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) struggle on processing complicated observations in interactive decision making tasks. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple hierarchical prompting approach. Diverging from previous prompting approaches that always put the full observation (e.g. a web page) to the prompt, we propose to first construct an action-aware observation which is more condensed and relevant with a dedicated SUMMARIZER prompt. The ACTOR prompt then predicts the next action based on the summarized observation. While our method has broad applicability, we particularly demonstrate its efficacy in the complex domain of web navigation where a full observation often contains redundant and irrelevant information. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art prompting mechanics by 6.2% on task success rate, demonstrating its potential on interactive decision making tasks with long observation traces.

Key facts. Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 14 of its 75 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

Builds on

14 of 75 references.

References · 14

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  3. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  4. 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,326
  5. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,348
  6. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
  7. 2022Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Controlcited by 1,210
  8. 2022Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Modelscited by 1,081
  9. 2019ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Taskscited by 783
  10. 2022ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Modelscited by 611
  11. 2023Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Enginescited by 303
  12. 2023Foundation Models for Decision Making: Problems, Methods, and Opportunitiescited by 164
2 more
  1. 2021MSP: Multi-Stage Prompting for Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Translatorscited by 35
  2. 2022Multi-Stage Prompting for Knowledgeable Dialogue Generationcited by 22

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2023: 7; 2024: 19; 2025: 10.

36 papers.

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  1. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
  2. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,195
  3. 2024GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Groundedcited by 563
  4. 2023Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Surveycited by 331
  5. 2025Plan-and-Act: Improving Planning of Agents for Long-Horizon Taskscited by 195
  6. 2024The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Researchcited by 161
  7. 2024OmniACT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Enabling Multimodal Generalist Autonomous Agents for Desktop and Webcited by 157
  8. 2024WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environmentscited by 121
  9. 2025A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Modelscited by 87
  10. 2024If LLM Is the Wizard, Then Code Is the Wand: A Survey on How Code Empowers Large Language Models to Serve as Intelligent Agentscited by 79
  11. 2023Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language modelscited by 72
  12. 2024AvaTaR: Optimizing LLM Agents for Tool Usage via Contrastive Reasoningcited by 72
24 more
  1. 2023LASER: LLM Agent with State-Space Exploration for Web Navigationcited by 66
  2. 2024ExACT: Teaching AI Agents to Explore with Reflective-MCTS and Exploratory Learningcited by 62
  3. 2023TPTU: Large Language Model-based AI Agents for Task Planning and Tool Usagecited by 55
  4. 2024Synatra: Turning Indirect Knowledge into Direct Demonstrations for Digital Agents at Scalecited by 43
  5. 2025OS-Kairos: Adaptive Interaction for MLLM-Powered GUI Agentscited by 25
  6. 2023Exposing Limitations of Language Model Agents in Sequential-Task Compositions on the Webcited by 24
  7. 2024Dual-View Visual Contextualization for Web Navigationcited by 24
  8. 2024WILBUR: Adaptive In-Context Learning for Robust and Accurate Web Agentscited by 22
  9. 2024AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generationcited by 20
  10. 2024Tur[k]ingBench: A Challenge Benchmark for Web Agentscited by 18
  11. 2025TRISHUL: Towards Region Identification and Screen Hierarchy Understanding for Large VLM based GUI Agentscited by 9
  12. 2024Grounded Language Agent for Product Search via Intelligent Web Interactionscited by 7
  13. 2024CAAP: Context-Aware Action Planning Prompting to Solve Computer Tasks with Front-End UI Onlycited by 4
  14. 2025Beyond Pixels: Exploring DOM Downsampling for LLM-Based Web Agentscited by 4
  15. 2024From Reward Shaping to Q-Shaping: Achieving Unbiased Learning with LLM-Guided Knowledgecited by 3
  16. 2025VLM Q-Learning: Aligning Vision-Language Models for Interactive Decision-Makingcited by 3
  17. 2024Enhancing Q-Learning with Large Language Model Heuristicscited by 2
  18. 2024Benchmarks Underestimate the Readiness of Multi-lingual Dialogue Agentscited by 1
  19. 2025Building Resource-Constrained Language Agents: A Korean Case Study on Chemical Toxicity Informationcited by 1
  20. 2023Word Definitions from Large Language Modelscited by 0
  21. 2024CIKMar: A Dual-Encoder Approach to Prompt-Based Reranking in Educational Dialogue Systemscited by 0
  22. 2025Improving Multi-turn Task Completion in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems via Prompt Chaining and Fine-Grained Feedbackcited by 0
  23. 2025Detecting Pipeline Failures through Fine-Grained Analysis of Web Agentscited by 0
  24. 2025Log2Plan: An Adaptive GUI Automation Framework Integrated with Task Mining Approachcited by 0