mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

arXiv 2412.05467 ↗First posted 6 Dec 2024cs.LG cs.AI cs.SEcited by 152

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents

Abstract (arXiv)

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging automation and Large Language Models (LLMs). Many existing benchmarks suffer from fragmentation and inconsistent evaluation methodologies, making it challenging to achieve reliable comparisons and reproducible results. In an earlier work, Drouin et al. (2024) introduced BrowserGym which aims to solve this by providing a unified, gym-like environment with well-defined observation and action spaces, facilitating standardized evaluation across diverse benchmarks. We propose an extended BrowserGym-based ecosystem for web agent research, which unifies existing benchmarks from the literature and includes AgentLab, a complementary framework that aids in agent creation, testing, and analysis. Our proposed ecosystem offers flexibility for integrating new benchmarks while ensuring consistent evaluation and comprehensive experiment management. As a supporting evidence, we conduct the first large-scale, multi-benchmark web agent experiment and compare the performance of 6 state-of-the-art LLMs across 6 popular web agent benchmarks made available in BrowserGym. Among other findings, our results highlight a large discrepancy between OpenAI and Anthropic's latests models, with Claude-3.5-Sonnet leading the way on almost all benchmarks, except on vision-related tasks where GPT-4o is superior. Despite these advancements, our results emphasize that building robust and efficient web agents remains a significant challenge, due to the inherent complexity of real-world web environments and the limitations of current models.

Key facts. Cited by 152 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 50 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2024.

Builds on

50 of 63 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Is Your LLM Secretly a World Model of the Internet? Model-Based Planning for Web Agents10 Nov
  2. 2024The Impact of Element Ordering on LM Agent Performance18 Sep
  3. 2024AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?22 Jul
  4. 2024WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments18 Jun
  5. 2024MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agents15 Apr
  6. 2024WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?12 Mar
  7. 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models25 Jan
  8. 2024GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded3 Jan
  9. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul
  10. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web9 Jun
  11. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents4 Jul

Other references · 39

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  3. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
  4. 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Modelscited by 3,155
  5. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
  6. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agentscited by 956
  7. 2024SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agentscited by 553
  8. 2023Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Modelscited by 551
  9. 2017Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applicationscited by 516
  10. 2024Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A surveycited by 414
  11. 2024Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agentscited by 373
  12. 2023Language Models can Solve Computer Taskscited by 371
27 more
  1. 2023A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesiscited by 350
  2. 2024AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-turn LLM Agentscited by 319
  3. 2023Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Controlcited by 314
  4. 2023Set-of-Mark Prompting Unleashes Extraordinary Visual Grounding in GPT-4Vcited by 291
  5. 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
  6. 2023Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinionscited by 250
  7. 2023ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddingscited by 238
  8. 2020Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequencescited by 180
  9. 2023Synapse: Trajectory-as-Exemplar Prompting with Memory for Computer Controlcited by 180
  10. 2024WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 177
  11. 2023Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Modelscited by 159
  12. 2024Tree Search for Language Model Agentscited by 148
  13. 2023OpenAgents: An Open Platform for Language Agents in the Wildcited by 136
  14. 2024Exploring the Reasoning Abilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs): A Comprehensive Survey on Emerging Trends in Multimodal Reasoningcited by 136
  15. 2024ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agentscited by 126
  16. 2024AnyTool: Self-Reflective, Hierarchical Agents for Large-Scale API Callscited by 121
  17. 2024WebPilot: A Versatile and Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Web Task Execution with Strategic Explorationcited by 100
  18. 2022A data-driven approach for learning to control computerscited by 87
  19. 2024CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environmentscited by 69
  20. 2023From Pixels to UI Actions: Learning to Follow Instructions via Graphical User Interfacescited by 67
  21. 2023SteP: Stacked LLM Policies for Web Actionscited by 66
  22. 2018Learning to Navigate the Webcited by 60
  23. 2024VLM Agents Generate Their Own Memories: Distilling Experience into Embodied Programs of Thoughtcited by 55
  24. 2024VideoWebArena: Evaluating Long Context Multimodal Agents with Video Understanding Web Taskscited by 43
  25. 2023Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigationcited by 36
  26. 2024Dual-View Visual Contextualization for Web Navigationcited by 24
  27. 2023WebVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation on Websitescited by 19

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 62; 2026: 89.

152 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 306
  2. 2025ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memorycited by 253
  3. 2025Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agentscited by 190
  4. 2025Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Taskscited by 103
  5. 2025SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agentscited by 97
  6. 2025A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Modelscited by 87
  7. 2025Holistic Agent Leaderboard: The Missing Infrastructure for AI Agent Evaluationcited by 83
  8. 2025ComputerRL: Scaling End-to-End Online Reinforcement Learning for Computer Use Agentscited by 49
  9. 2025RedTeamCUA: Realistic Adversarial Testing of Computer-Use Agents in Hybrid Web-OS Environmentscited by 42
  10. 2025Web-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Web Agentscited by 41
  11. 2025CowPilot: A Framework for Autonomous and Human-Agent Collaborative Web Navigationcited by 35
  12. 2025Go-Browse: Training Web Agents with Structured Explorationcited by 32
38 more
  1. 2025A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search: Towards Next-Generation Information Retrievalcited by 31
  2. 2025DoomArena: A framework for Testing AI Agents Against Evolving Security Threatscited by 31
  3. 2025WebChoreArena: Evaluating Web Browsing Agents on Realistic Tedious Web Taskscited by 29
  4. 2026APEX-Agentscited by 29
  5. 2026OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Taskscited by 29
  6. 2025Agentic AI Security: Threats, Defenses, Evaluation, and Open Challengescited by 26
  7. 2025PolySkill: Learning Generalizable Skills Through Polymorphic Abstractioncited by 25
  8. 2025Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents: Harnessing Complementary Strengths of Large and Small LLMscited by 24
  9. 2025Coding Agents with Multimodal Browsing are Generalist Problem Solverscited by 24
  10. 2025MedAgentGym: A Scalable Agentic Training Environment for Code-Centric Reasoning in Biomedical Data Sciencecited by 22
  11. 2025WebGuard: Building a Generalizable Guardrail for Web Agentscited by 20
  12. 2025AgentA/B: Automated and Scalable Web A/BTesting with Interactive LLM Agentscited by 19
  13. 2025How to Train Your LLM Web Agent: A Statistical Diagnosiscited by 18
  14. 2025BrowserAgent: Building Web Agents with Human-Inspired Web Browsing Actionscited by 17
  15. 2026MolmoWeb: Open Visual Web Agent and Open Data for the Open Webcited by 17
  16. 2025MIRAGE-Bench: LLM Agent is Hallucinating and Where to Find Themcited by 16
  17. 2025Agent Data Protocol: Unifying Datasets for Diverse, Effective Fine-tuning of LLM Agentscited by 16
  18. 2025Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Integrated Reasoning in VLMscited by 16
  19. 2025WebMall -- A Multi-Shop Benchmark for Evaluating Web Agentscited by 15
  20. 2026Inside the Scaffold: A Source-Code Taxonomy of Coding Agent Architecturescited by 15
  21. 2025R2D2: Remembering, Replaying and Dynamic Decision Making with a Reflective Agentic Memorycited by 14
  22. 2025Why and How LLMs Hallucinate: Connecting the Dots with Subsequence Associationscited by 14
  23. 2025WAREX: Web Agent Reliability Evaluation on Existing Benchmarkscited by 14
  24. 2025Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Agent Safetycited by 14
  25. 2026ContractSkill: Repairable Contract-Based Skills for Multimodal Web Agentscited by 13
  26. 2025BrowserArena: Evaluating LLM Agents on Real-World Web Navigation Taskscited by 12
  27. 2025M^3-Bench: Multi-Modal, Multi-Hop, Multi-Threaded Tool-Using MLLM Agent Benchmarkcited by 11
  28. 2026Claw-Eval-Live: A Live Agent Benchmark for Evolving Real-World Workflowscited by 11
  29. 2025A Framework for Studying AI Agent Behavior: Evidence from Consumer Choice Experimentscited by 10
  30. 2025OpenApps: Simulating Environment Variations to Measure UI-Agent Reliabilitycited by 10
  31. 2025AdInject: Real-World Black-Box Attacks on Web Agents via Advertising Deliverycited by 9
  32. 2025Unintended Misalignment from Agentic Fine-Tuning: Risks and Mitigationcited by 9
  33. 2025MLE-Smith: Scaling MLE Tasks with Automated Multi-Agent Pipelinecited by 9
  34. 2026HATS: Hardness-Aware Trajectory Synthesis for GUI Agentscited by 9
  35. 2026WebGameBench: Requirement-to-Application Evaluation for Coding Agents via Browser-Native Gamescited by 9
  36. 2026From Question Answering to Task Completion: A Survey on Agent System and Harness Designcited by 9
  37. 2025EconWebArena: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Economic Tasks in Realistic Web Environmentscited by 8
  38. 2025CORE: Full-Path Evaluation of LLM Agents Beyond Final Statecited by 8

50 most cited of 152 All 152 (JSON)

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  1. 2025X-WebAgentBench: A Multilingual Interactive Web Benchmark for Evaluating Global Agentic System
  2. 2025AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectories
  3. 2025An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents
  4. 2026Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Tasks
  5. 2026Improving LLM-based Autonomous Web Agents with Filtering
  6. 2026WebRetriever: A Large-Scale Comprehensive Benchmark for Efficient Web Agent Evaluation
  7. 2024Towards a Realistic Long-Term Benchmark for Open-Web Research Agents
  8. 2025Build the web for agents, not agents for the web