mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

TimeWarp: Evaluating Web Agents by Revisiting the Past

arXiv 2603.04949 ↗First posted 5 Mar 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.CVcited by 6

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

Abstract (arXiv)

As web agents close the gap with humans on benchmarks, one question arises: Do today's agents perform just as well on tomorrow's web? We introduce TimeWarp, a benchmark that emulates the evolving web. TimeWarp consists of three web environments, each with six UI versions spanning UI design, frontend code, and workflows from different eras of the internet. We pair TimeWarp with a set of complex, realistic tasks covering different forms of web navigation. Our experiments reveal that vision-based agents are vulnerable to changes, while text-based agents become brittle once fine-tuned on a single version. To address this, we propose TimeTraj, a new annotation method that uses plan distillation to collect trajectories across multiple versions. By training agents on teacher rollouts using our BC-variant, we achieve substantial performance gains: 20.4% to 37.7% for Qwen-3 4B and 0% to 27.0% for Llama-3.1 8B models. Our work helps study generalization across web designs and opens a new paradigm for collecting plans rather than trajectories to improve the robustness of web agents.

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 34 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

Builds on

34 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 16

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. 2025BEARCUBS: A benchmark for computer-using web agents10 Mar
  5. 2025Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents17 Feb
  6. 2025InSTA: Towards Internet-Scale Training For Agents10 Feb
  7. 2024AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials12 Dec
  8. 2024The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research6 Dec
  9. 2024WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning4 Nov
  10. 2024AgentOccam: A Simple Yet Strong Baseline for LLM-Based Web Agents17 Oct
  11. 2024AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?22 Jul
  12. 2024WebCanvas: Benchmarking Web Agents in Online Environments18 Jun
4 more
  1. 2024WebSuite: Systematically Evaluating Why Web Agents Fail1 Jun
  2. 2024WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?12 Mar
  3. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul
  4. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents4 Jul

Other references · 18

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
  4. 2016Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networkscited by 4,718
  5. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
  6. 2025Gemma 3 Technical Reportcited by 1,686
  7. 2024LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Modelscited by 1,442
  8. 2019ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Modelscited by 1,278
  9. 2016Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Costcited by 825
  10. 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 616
  11. 2024LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Lesscited by 313
  12. 2024Agent Q: Advanced Reasoning and Learning for Autonomous AI Agentscited by 201
6 more
  1. 2024VisualAgentBench: Towards Large Multimodal Models as Visual Foundation Agentscited by 101
  2. 2024A Survey on LoRA of Large Language Modelscited by 67
  3. 2024Direct Multi-Turn Preference Optimization for Language Agentscited by 63
  4. 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Agents for Computer Use: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 33
  5. 2024LLM-as-a-Judge & Reward Model: What They Can and Cannot Docited by 32
  6. 2023Pangu-Agent: A Fine-Tunable Generalist Agent with Structured Reasoningcited by 30

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Tasks
  2. 2024From Grounding to Planning: Benchmarking Bottlenecks in Web Agents
  3. 2026Structured Distillation of Web Agent Capabilities Enables Generalization
  4. 2026WebRetriever: A Large-Scale Comprehensive Benchmark for Efficient Web Agent Evaluation
  5. 2026Where Did It Go Wrong? Process-Level Evaluation of Web Agents with Semantic State Tracking
  6. 2026SynWeaver: Website-Prior Task and Trajectory Co-Synthesis for Web Agents
  7. 2026WebChallenger: A Reliable and Efficient Generalist Web Agent
  8. 2026CAP: A Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-Site Browser Agents with Complex Actions and Perception