# WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07718 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07718/

## Key facts

- Cited by 363 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 23 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [Language Models can Solve Computer Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17491/) (2023)
- [A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12856/) (2023)
- [AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12823/) (2023)
- [Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10088/) (2023)
- [Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4V](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11441/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08802/) (2018)
- [Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03776/) (2020)
- [WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05930/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11854/) (2023)
- [A data-driven approach for learning to control computers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08137/) (2022)
- [BOLAA: Benchmarking and Orchestrating LLM-augmented Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05960/) (2023)
- [Automatic Macro Mining from Interaction Traces at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07023/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 363)

- [OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16741/) (2024)
- [AndroidWorld: A Dynamic Benchmarking Environment for Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14573/) (2024)
- [Agent Workflow Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07429/) (2024)
- [TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14161/) (2024)
- [Windows Agent Arena: Evaluating Multi-Modal OS Agents at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08264/) (2024)
- [AI Agents That Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01502/) (2024)
- [Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16416/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18279/) (2024)
- [The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05467/) (2024)
- [OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09123/) (2025)
- [AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15711/) (2024)
- [Tree Search for Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01476/) (2024)
- [Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13227/) (2025)
- [ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06703/) (2024)
- [AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09605/) (2024)
- [Web Agents with World Models: Learning and Leveraging Environment Dynamics in Web Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13232/) (2024)
- [WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12373/) (2024)
- [Dissecting Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12814/) (2024)
- [Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06821/) (2025)
- [AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08942/) (2025)
- [VisualAgentBench: Towards Large Multimodal Models as Visual Foundation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06327/) (2024)
- [GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13501/) (2024)
- [SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04957/) (2025)
- [Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07278/) (2025)
- [Beyond Browsing: API-Based Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16464/) (2024)
- [UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15661/) (2025)
- [CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02305/) (2024)
- [Refusal-Trained LLMs Are Easily Jailbroken As Browser Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13886/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Gym: A Framework for Enabling and Evaluating Human-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15701/) (2024)
- [AgentRx: Diagnosing AI Agent Failures from Execution Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02475/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuring the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.