PAFFA: Premeditated Actions For Fast Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Modern AI assistants have made significant progress in natural language understanding and tool-use, with emerging efforts to interact with Web interfaces. However, current approaches that heavily rely on repeated LLM-driven HTML parsing are computationally expensive and error-prone, particularly when handling dynamic web interfaces and multi-step tasks. We introduce PAFFA (Premeditated Actions For Fast Agents), a method that makes LLMs faster and more accurate in completing tasks on the internet using a novel inference-time technique that requires no task-specific training. PAFFA constructs an 'Action Library', leveraging the parametric knowledge of the base LLM to pre-compute browser interaction patterns that generalize across tasks. By strategically re-using LLM inference across tasks - either via 'Dist-Map' for task-agnostic identification of key interactive web elements, or 'Unravel' for first-encounter, stateful exploration of novel tasks/sites) - PAFFA drastically reduces inference time tokens by 87% while maintaining robust performance (achieving 0.57 vs. 0.50 step accuracy compared to baseline). Further, Unravel's ability to update its action library based on explorations allows generalization and adaptation to unseen websites. In sum, this work exhibits that LLM reasoning sequences can generalize across prompts, offering a way to scale inference-time techniques for internet-scale data with sublinear token count.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 13 of its 17 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2024.
Builds on
13 of 17 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2024WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments18 Jun
- 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models25 Jan
- 2023LASER: LLM Agent with State-Space Exploration for Web Navigation15 Sep
- 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web9 Jun
Other references · 9
- 2022Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Modelscited by 3,024
- 2020DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attentioncited by 2,181
- 2023A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesiscited by 353
- 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 284
- 2024WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 180
- 2024Autonomous Evaluation and Refinement of Digital Agentscited by 137
- 2023From Pixels to UI Actions: Learning to Follow Instructions via Graphical User Interfacescited by 68
- 2021MarkupLM: Pre-training of Text and Markup Language for Visually-rich Document Understandingcited by 45
- 2020FLIN: A Flexible Natural Language Interface for Web Navigationcited by 18
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
- 2026The Tool Illusion: Rethinking Tool Use in Web Agentscited by 4
- 2026The Tool Illusion: Rethinking Tool Use in Web Agents3 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Pre-Act: Multi-Step Planning and Reasoning Improves Acting in LLM Agents
- 2026Improving LLM-based Autonomous Web Agents with Filtering
- 2025Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents: Harnessing Complementary Strengths of Large and Small LLMs
- 2025Evaluating Long-Context Reasoning in LLM-Based WebAgents
- 2025BrowserAgent: Building Web Agents with Human-Inspired Web Browsing Actions
- 2026WebFactory: Automated Compression of Foundational Language Intelligence into Grounded Web Agents
- 2024Large Language Models Can Self-Improve At Web Agent Tasks
- 2026AI Planning Framework for LLM-Based Web Agents