# Tur[k]ingBench: A Challenge Benchmark for Web Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11905/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 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 51 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 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, 30 of 51)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (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)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [Language Models can Solve Computer Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17491/) (2023)
- [Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03347/) (2022)
- [A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12856/) (2023)
- [Tool Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08354/) (2023)
- [PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01279/) (2022)
- [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)
- [CM3: A Causal Masked Multimodal Model of the Internet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07520/) (2022)
- [UIBert: Learning Generic Multimodal Representations for UI Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13731/) (2021)
- [AndroidEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Android](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13231/) (2021)
- [A data-driven approach for learning to control computers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08137/) (2022)

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

- [AI Agents That Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01502/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21460/) (2025)
- [WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07572/) (2025)
- [Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18279/) (2024)
- [AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15711/) (2024)
- [GUI Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13501/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Empowered Personalized Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17236/) (2024)
- [OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for General Computing Devices Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04482/) (2025)
- [Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents: Harnessing Complementary Strengths of Large and Small LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07942/) (2025)
- [Investigating the Impact of Dark Patterns on LLM-Based Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18113/) (2025)
- [Agent Data Protocol: Unifying Datasets for Diverse, Effective Fine-tuning of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24702/) (2025)
- [Evolutionary Perspectives on the Evaluation of LLM-Based AI Agents: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11102/) (2025)
- [From Question Answering to Task Completion: A Survey on Agent System and Harness Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20683/) (2026)
- [TextAtari: 100K Frames Game Playing with Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04098/) (2025)
- [Mind the Web: The Security of Web Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07153/) (2025)
- [Can LLM Agents Be CFOs? Benchmarking Long-Horizon Resource Allocation in an Uncertain Enterprise Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23638/) (2026)
- [CAP: A Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-Site Browser Agents with Complex Actions and Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08392/) (2026)
- [RiskWebWorld: A Realistic Interactive Benchmark for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13531/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Can advanced multi-modal models effectively tackle complex web-based tasks? Such tasks are often found on crowdsourcing platforms, where crowdworkers engage in challenging micro-tasks within web-based environments. Building on this idea, we present TurkingBench, a benchmark consisting of tasks presented as web pages with textual instructions and multi-modal contexts. Unlike previous approaches that rely on artificially synthesized web pages, our benchmark uses natural HTML pages originally designed for crowdsourcing workers to perform various annotation tasks. Each task's HTML instructions are instantiated with different values derived from crowdsourcing tasks, creating diverse instances. This benchmark includes 32.2K instances spread across 158 tasks. To support the evaluation of TurkingBench, we have developed a framework that links chatbot responses to actions on web pages (e.g., modifying a text box, selecting a radio button). We assess the performance of cutting-edge private and open-source models, including language-only and vision-language models (such as GPT4 and InternVL), on this benchmark. Our results show that while these models outperform random chance, there is still significant room for improvement. We hope that this benchmark will drive progress in the evaluation and development of web-based agents.