mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Weasel: Out-of-Domain Generalization for Web Agents via Importance-Diversity Data Selection

arXiv 2605.20291 ↗First posted 19 May 2026cs.LGcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled web agents that follow natural language goals through multi-step browser interactions. However, agents fine-tuned on specific trajectories and domain often struggle to generalize out of domain, and offline training can be compute-inefficient due to noisy, redundant trajectories and long accessibility-tree (AXTree) states. To address both issues, we propose Weasel, a trajectory selection method for offline training of web agents. Weasel selects a fixed-budget subset of trajectory steps by optimizing an objective that balances unary importance with pairwise diversity over states, websites, and interaction patterns, solving efficiently with a greedy algorithm. We further improve efficiency with target-centered AXTree pruning that keeps only content around the ground-truth action target, and we mitigate style mismatch for reasoning-native models by replacing expert traces with model-generated, style-consistent rationales. Across AgentTrek and NNetNav training datasets, evaluations in WebArena, WorkArena, and MiniWob, and experiments with Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma3-4B, and Qwen3-8B, Weasel improves out-of-domain performance while reducing training cost, producing roughly 9.7-12.5× training speedups over standard fine-tuning. We make the code available at https://github.com/fatemehpesaran310/weasel.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 18 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 May 2026.

Builds on

18 of 37 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines29 Sep
  2. 2025LineRetriever: Planning-Aware Observation Reduction for Web Agents30 Jun
  3. 2025Learning to Contextualize Web Pages for Enhanced Decision Making by LLM Agents12 Mar
  4. 2024AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials12 Dec
  5. 2024The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research6 Dec
  6. 2024WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning4 Nov
  7. 2024WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?12 Mar

Other references · 11

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
  3. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  4. 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,175
  5. 2018Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Explorationcited by 282
  6. 2020GLISTER: Generalization based Data Subset Selection for Efficient and Robust Learningcited by 224
  7. 2024WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 177
  8. 2023Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuningcited by 76
  9. 2024HtmlRAG: HTML is Better Than Plain Text for Modeling Retrieved Knowledge in RAG Systemscited by 37
  10. 2025FocusAgent: Simple Yet Effective Ways of Trimming the Large Context of Web Agentscited by 16
  11. 2024WEPO: Web Element Preference Optimization for LLM-based Web Navigationcited by 10

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  1. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web
  2. 2024WILBUR: Adaptive In-Context Learning for Robust and Accurate Web Agents
  3. 2026WebFactory: Automated Compression of Foundational Language Intelligence into Grounded Web Agents
  4. 2024Large Language Models Can Self-Improve At Web Agent Tasks
  5. 2025Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents: Harnessing Complementary Strengths of Large and Small LLMs
  6. 2026Improving LLM-based Autonomous Web Agents with Filtering
  7. 2025JEF-Hinter: Leveraging Offline Knowledge for Improving Web Agents Adaptation
  8. 2026Can Agents Generalize to the Open World? Unveiling the Fragility of Static Training in Tool Use