Scaling Web Agent Training through Automatic Data Generation and Fine-grained Evaluation
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
We present a scalable pipeline for automatically generating high-quality training data for web agents. In particular, a major challenge in identifying high-quality training instances is trajectory evaluation - quantifying how much progress was made towards task completion. We introduce a novel constraint-based evaluation framework that provides fine-grained assessment of progress towards task completion. This enables us to leverage partially successful trajectories, which significantly expands the amount of usable training data. We evaluate our method on a new benchmark we propose called BookingArena, which consists of complex booking tasks across 20 popular websites, and demonstrate that our distilled student model outperforms open-source approaches and matches or exceeds commercial systems, while being a significantly smaller model. Our work addresses the challenge of efficiently creating diverse, realistic web interaction datasets and provides a systematic evaluation methodology for complex structured web tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 6 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 15 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2026.
Builds on
15 of 31 references.
Closest ancestors · 10
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents17 Feb
- 2025InSTA: Towards Internet-Scale Training For Agents10 Feb
- 2024Agent-E: From Autonomous Web Navigation to Foundational Design Principles in Agentic Systems17 Jul
- 2024WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments18 Jun
- 2024WILBUR: Adaptive In-Context Learning for Robust and Accurate Web Agents8 Apr
- 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models25 Jan
- 2024GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded3 Jan
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul
- 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web9 Jun
- 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents4 Jul
Other references · 5
- 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
- 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,686
- 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 584
- 2024WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 177
- 2024Autonomous Evaluation and Refinement of Digital Agentscited by 136
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planningcited by 4
- 2026AlphaEval: Evaluating Agents in Productioncited by 1
- 2026Region4Web: Rethinking Observation Space Granularity for Web Agentscited by 1
- 2026BrowserForge: Scaling Web Episode via Parallel Browser Sandboxescited by 0
- 2026WebPageBench: Event-Level Verification and Controlled UI-Variant Generation for Web Agentscited by 0
- 2026Auditing Web Agent Evaluation on WebArena-Lite: Human Review of Outcomes and Trajectoriescited by 0
- 2026Auditing Web Agent Evaluation on WebArena-Lite: Human Review of Outcomes and Trajectories1 Oct 2026
- 2026WebPageBench: Event-Level Verification and Controlled UI-Variant Generation for Web Agents28 Sep 2026
- 2026BrowserForge: Scaling Web Episode via Parallel Browser Sandboxes25 Aug 2026
- 2026Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planning25 Jun 2026
- 2026Region4Web: Rethinking Observation Space Granularity for Web Agents8 May 2026
- 2026AlphaEval: Evaluating Agents in Production14 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectories
- 2026WebRetriever: A Large-Scale Comprehensive Benchmark for Efficient Web Agent Evaluation
- 2026Structured Distillation of Web Agent Capabilities Enables Generalization
- 2026GTA: Generating Long-Horizon Tasks for Web Agents at Scale
- 2026WebWorld: A Large-Scale World Model for Web Agent Training
- 2026Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Tasks
- 2025Go-Browse: Training Web Agents with Structured Exploration
- 2025WebGraphEval: Multi-Turn Trajectory Evaluation for Web Agents using Graph Representation