# Turbocharging Web Automation: The Impact of Compressed History States

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21369/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10935/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024)
- [A Real-World WebAgent with Planning, Long Context Understanding, and Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12856/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08802/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Dual-View Visual Contextualization for Web Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04476/) (2024)
- [R-VLM: Region-Aware Vision Language Model for Precise GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05673/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Vision-Language Pre-training with Rich Supervisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03346/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [WebCoach: Self-Evolving Web Agents with Cross-Session Memory Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12997/) (2025)
- [Towards GUI Agents: Vision-Language Diffusion Models for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26211/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language models have led to a leap forward in web automation. The current web automation approaches take the current web state, history actions, and language instruction as inputs to predict the next action, overlooking the importance of history states. However, the highly verbose nature of web page states can result in long input sequences and sparse information, hampering the effective utilization of history states. In this paper, we propose a novel web history compressor approach to turbocharge web automation using history states. Our approach employs a history compressor module that distills the most task-relevant information from each history state into a fixed-length short representation, mitigating the challenges posed by the highly verbose history states. Experiments are conducted on the Mind2Web and WebLINX datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Results show that our approach obtains 1.2-5.4% absolute accuracy improvements compared to the baseline approach without history inputs.