mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

InSTA: Towards Internet-Scale Training For Agents

arXiv 2502.06776 ↗First posted 10 Feb 2025cs.LG cs.AIcited by 32

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

Abstract (arXiv)

The predominant approach for training web navigation agents is to gather human demonstrations for a set of popular websites and hand-written tasks, but it is becoming clear that human data is an inefficient resource. We develop a pipeline to facilitate internet-scale training for agents without laborious human annotations. In the first stage, an LLM annotates 150k sites with agentic tasks. In the next stage, LLM agents complete tasks and produce trajectories. In the final stage, an LLM filters trajectories by judging their success. Language models are powerful data curation tools, identifying harmful content with an accuracy of 97%, judging successful trajectories with an accuracy of 82.6%, and producing effective data. We train agents based on Qwen 3 1.7B that are competitive with frontier LLMs as web agents, while being smaller and faster. Our top agent reaches a success rate of 56.9%, outperforming the data collection policy Qwen 3 235B, a 235 times larger Llama 4 Maverick, and reaching 94.7% of the performance of Gemini 2.5 Flash. We are releasing code, models and data at: https://data-for-agents.github.io.

Key facts. Cited by 32 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 41 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2025.

Builds on

41 of 57 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Proposer-Agent-Evaluator(PAE): Autonomous Skill Discovery For Foundation Model Internet Agents17 Dec
  2. 2024ScribeAgent: Towards Specialized Web Agents Using Production-Scale Workflow Data22 Nov
  3. 2024NNetNav: Unsupervised Learning of Browser Agents Through Environment Interaction in the Wild3 Oct
  4. 2024Large Language Models Can Self-Improve At Web Agent Tasks30 May
  5. 2024WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?12 Mar
  6. 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models25 Jan
  7. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul
  8. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web9 Jun
  9. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents4 Jul

Other references · 32

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  3. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,944
  4. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  5. 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,789
  6. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,442
  7. 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Modelscited by 3,211
  8. 2018UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reductioncited by 2,898
  9. 2023Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4cited by 2,592
  10. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,242
  11. 2024Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameterscited by 1,986
  12. 2023Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Modelscited by 886
20 more
  1. 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agentscited by 704
  2. 2023Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Modelscited by 574
  3. 2024From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judgecited by 494
  4. 2024Generative Verifiers: Reward Modeling as Next-Token Predictioncited by 480
  5. 2023AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMscited by 338
  6. 2023Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Controlcited by 319
  7. 2023Effective Data Augmentation With Diffusion Modelscited by 283
  8. 2023REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representationscited by 205
  9. 2024Preference Fine-Tuning of LLMs Should Leverage Suboptimal, On-Policy Datacited by 185
  10. 2024WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 180
  11. 2024Tree Search for Language Model Agentscited by 151
  12. 2022Language Models as Agent Modelscited by 132
  13. 2024Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGIcited by 127
  14. 2024AnyTool: Self-Reflective, Hierarchical Agents for Large-Scale API Callscited by 124
  15. 2024Fast Best-of-N Decoding via Speculative Rejectioncited by 112
  16. 2024VisualWebBench: How Far Have Multimodal LLMs Evolved in Web Page Understanding and Grounding?cited by 100
  17. 2024RL on Incorrect Synthetic Data Scales the Efficiency of LLM Math Reasoning by Eight-Foldcited by 99
  18. 2024LLMs Still Can't Plan; Can LRMs? A Preliminary Evaluation of OpenAI's o1 on PlanBenchcited by 94
  19. 2024AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flowscited by 89
  20. 2024Better Synthetic Data by Retrieving and Transforming Existing Datasetscited by 36

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 11; 2026: 21.

32 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025Deep Research: A Survey of Autonomous Research Agentscited by 66
  2. 2025WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Coevolving World Modelcited by 61
  3. 2025OdysseyBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Complex Office Application Workflowscited by 57
  4. 2025Thinking vs. Doing: Agents that Reason by Scaling Test-Time Interactioncited by 34
  5. 2025Go-Browse: Training Web Agents with Structured Explorationcited by 33
  6. 2026AutoWebWorld: Synthesizing Infinite Verifiable Web Environments via Finite State Machinescited by 21
  7. 2026WebGym: Scaling Training Environments for Visual Web Agents with Realistic Taskscited by 19
  8. 2025Build the web for agents, not agents for the webcited by 18
  9. 2025LLMs as Scalable, General-Purpose Simulators For Evolving Digital Agent Trainingcited by 18
  10. 2025WebCoT: Enhancing Web Agent Reasoning by Reconstructing Chain-of-Thought in Reflection, Branching, and Rollbackcited by 17
  11. 2025Let's Think in Two Steps: Mitigating Agreement Bias in MLLMs with Self-Grounded Verificationcited by 14
  12. 2026DynaWeb: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning of Web Agentscited by 14
20 more
  1. 2026ContractSkill: Repairable Contract-Based Skills for Multimodal Web Agentscited by 13
  2. 2026EnvHarness: Awakening Static Worlds for Agent Learningcited by 13
  3. 2026Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Applicationcited by 8
  4. 2026TimeWarp: Evaluating Web Agents by Revisiting the Pastcited by 7
  5. 2025Malice in Agentland: Down the Rabbit Hole of Backdoors in the AI Supply Chaincited by 6
  6. 2026Scaling Web Agent Training through Automatic Data Generation and Fine-grained Evaluationcited by 6
  7. 2026WebFactory: Automated Compression of Foundational Language Intelligence into Grounded Web Agentscited by 6
  8. 2026OpenWebRL: Demystifying Online Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for Visual Web Agentscited by 6
  9. 2026Self-Improvement of Large Language Models: A Technical Overview and Future Outlookcited by 5
  10. 2026Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planningcited by 5
  11. 2026Weblica: Scalable and Reproducible Training Environments for Visual Web Agentscited by 4
  12. 2025Even Small Reasoners Should Quote Their Sources: Introducing the Pleias-RAG Model Familycited by 3
  13. 2026Structured Distillation of Web Agent Capabilities Enables Generalizationcited by 3
  14. 2026ProCUA-SFT Technical Reportcited by 2
  15. 2026OSReward: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Cross-Platform Computer-Use Reward Modelscited by 2
  16. 2026Software Engineering for and with GUI Agentcited by 1
  17. 2026Best-of-Q: Improving VLM agents with Q-function Action Ranking at Inferencecited by 0
  18. 2026MintAct: A Unified Visual Agent for Digital Environmentscited by 0
  19. 2026WebPageBench: Event-Level Verification and Controlled UI-Variant Generation for Web Agentscited by 0
  20. 2026HyWe: Unifying Search and Operation for Real-World Hybrid Web Taskscited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2024AgentOccam: A Simple Yet Strong Baseline for LLM-Based Web Agents
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  3. 2025How to Train Your LLM Web Agent: A Statistical Diagnosis
  4. 2025AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectories
  5. 2026AI Planning Framework for LLM-Based Web Agents
  6. 2023Multimodal Web Navigation with Instruction-Finetuned Foundation Models
  7. 2025Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents
  8. 2025Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents: Harnessing Complementary Strengths of Large and Small LLMs