mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

WebGym: Scaling Training Environments for Visual Web Agents with Realistic Tasks

arXiv 2601.02439 ↗First posted 5 Jan 2026cs.LG cs.CVcited by 19

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

Abstract (arXiv)

We present WebGym, the largest-to-date open-source environment for training realistic visual web agents. Real websites are non-stationary and diverse, making artificial or small-scale task sets insufficient for robust policy learning. WebGym contains nearly 300,000 tasks with rubric-based evaluations across diverse, real-world websites and difficulty levels. We train agents with a simple reinforcement learning (RL) recipe, which trains on the agent's own interaction traces (rollouts), using task rewards as feedback to guide learning. To enable scaling RL, we speed up sampling of trajectories in WebGym by developing a high-throughput asynchronous rollout system, designed specifically for web agents. Our system achieves a 4-5x rollout speedup compared to naive implementations. Second, we scale the task set breadth, depth, and size, which results in continued performance improvement. Fine-tuning a strong base vision-language model, Qwen-3-VL-8B-Instruct, on WebGym results in an improvement in success rate on an out-of-distribution test set from 26.2% to 42.9%, significantly outperforming agents based on proprietary models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5-Thinking that achieve 27.1% and 29.8%, respectively. This improvement is substantial because our test set consists only of tasks on websites never seen during training, unlike many other prior works on training visual web agents.

Key facts. Cited by 19 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 38 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

Builds on

38 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge26 Jun
  2. 2025REAL: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Deterministic Simulations of Real Websites15 Apr
  3. 2025An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents2 Apr
  4. 2025InSTA: Towards Internet-Scale Training For Agents10 Feb
  5. 2025PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search17 Jan
  6. 2024Proposer-Agent-Evaluator(PAE): Autonomous Skill Discovery For Foundation Model Internet Agents17 Dec
  7. 2024WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning4 Nov
  8. 2024WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments18 Jun
  9. 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models25 Jan
  10. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul

Other references · 28

  1. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
  2. 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,686
  3. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
  4. 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,084
  5. 2022Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Taskscited by 858
  6. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 653
  7. 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 616
  8. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
  9. 2025Group-in-Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Trainingcited by 442
  10. 2024TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Real-World Planning with Language Agentscited by 385
  11. 2025Rubrics as Rewards: Reinforcement Learning Beyond Verifiable Domainscited by 328
  12. 2024Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gymcited by 300
16 more
  1. 2025OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Modelscited by 287
  2. 2025DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environmentscited by 268
  3. 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 234
  4. 2024DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learningcited by 210
  5. 2025RM-R1: Reward Modeling as Reasoningcited by 149
  6. 2025Reinforcement Learning with Rubric Anchorscited by 108
  7. 2025Grounded Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoningcited by 80
  8. 2025e3: Learning to Explore Enables Extrapolation of Test-Time Compute for LLMscited by 56
  9. 2025SkyRL-Agent: Efficient RL Training for Multi-turn LLM Agentcited by 44
  10. 2025DeepShop: A Benchmark for Deep Research Shopping Agentscited by 42
  11. 2025AgentSynth: Scalable Task Generation for Generalist Computer-Use Agentscited by 41
  12. 2025Thinking vs. Doing: Agents that Reason by Scaling Test-Time Interactioncited by 34
  13. 2025Rubric Is All You Need: Enhancing LLM-based Code Evaluation With Question-Specific Rubricscited by 29
  14. 2025PipelineRL: Faster On-policy Reinforcement Learning for Long Sequence Generationcited by 29
  15. 2025Reinforce-Ada: An Adaptive Sampling Framework under Non-linear RL Objectivescited by 23
  16. 2025Digi-Q: Learning Q-Value Functions for Training Device-Control Agentscited by 20

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 19.

19 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2026Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligencecited by 35
  2. 2026Qwen-AgentWorld: Language World Models for General Agentscited by 22
  3. 2026GUI-Libra: Training Native GUI Agents to Reason and Act with Action-aware Supervision and Partially Verifiable RLcited by 14
  4. 2026MobileGym: A Verifiable and Highly Parallel Simulation Platform for Mobile GUI Agent Researchcited by 9
  5. 2026Orchard: An Open-Source Agentic Modeling Frameworkcited by 7
  6. 2026OpenForgeRL: Train Harness-native Agents in Any Environmentcited by 7
  7. 2026OpenWebRL: Demystifying Online Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for Visual Web Agentscited by 6
  8. 2026On Training Large Language Models for Long-Horizon Tasks: An Empirical Study of Horizon Lengthcited by 5
  9. 2026OmniGameArena: A Unified UE5 Benchmark for VLM Game Agents with Improvement Dynamicscited by 4
  10. 2026Weblica: Scalable and Reproducible Training Environments for Visual Web Agentscited by 3
  11. 2026AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agentscited by 2
  12. 2026PRO-CUA: Process-Reward Optimization for Computer Use Agentscited by 1
7 more
  1. 2026Wuying-Browser-Agent: Real-World Centric Fundamental Long-Horizon Browser Agentscited by 1
  2. 2026Agentic Mixed-Source Multi-Modal Misinformation Detection with Adaptive Test-Time Scalingcited by 0
  3. 2026RiskWebWorld: A Realistic Interactive Benchmark for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Managementcited by 0
  4. 2026Spreadsheet-RL: Advancing Large Language Model Agents on Realistic Spreadsheet Tasks via Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  5. 2026SeekJudge: A Practical Reward Framework for Reinforcement Learning in Computer-Use Agentscited by 0
  6. 2026Environments as Scaffold: Enriching Feedback to Bootstrap Self-Evolving Agents in Long-Horizon Taskscited by 0
  7. 2026WEFT: Scaling Tool-Use Post-Training for General-Purpose Agentscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
  2. 2025WEBSERV: A Full-Stack and RL-Ready Web Environment for Training Web Agents at Scale
  3. 2026InfiniteWeb: Scalable Web Environment Synthesis for GUI Agent Training
  4. 2026WebFactory: Automated Compression of Foundational Language Intelligence into Grounded Web Agents
  5. 2026OpAgent: Operator Agent for Web Navigation
  6. 2026WebWorld: A Large-Scale World Model for Web Agent Training
  7. 2026SCAFFOLD: Self-Improving Web Agents via Recursive Parametric Skill Abstraction
  8. 2025How to Train Your LLM Web Agent: A Statistical Diagnosis