AutoTailor: Automatic, User-Aligned Capability Selection and Adaptation for Web Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Web agents can utilize reusable tools to reduce the cost and latency of low-level browser interaction, but automatically discovered tool collections can be large, redundant, and poorly aligned with user demand. We present AutoTailor, a meta-agentic framework for constructing and maintaining a compact set of trajectory-derived Model Context Protocol (MCP) APIs. Offline, AutoTailor converts web trajectories into parameterized browser-automation programs, applies a Quality Filter to remove APIs with unsuitable granularity and redundant functionality, and applies a Usage Likelihood Filter to prioritize broadly useful capabilities while preserving semantic coverage. Online, Dynamic Reselection monitors task outcomes and API usage, identifies recurring coverage gaps, adds relevant candidates, and prunes persistently unused capabilities. We evaluate AutoTailor on 106 WebArena Postmill tasks. Offline filtering reduces the initial 1,283 unrefined APIs to 87, and Dynamic Reselection produces a 33-API set. With reasoning and acting (ReAct) fallback, this set achieves 90.6% correctness, compared with 87.5% for ReAct alone, while reducing average total request-token cost by 57.8% and latency by 29.4%. Without ReAct, it achieves 60.1% correctness, marginally matching the performance of unrefined set, while reducing request-token usage by 94.9%. Together, these results show that static filtering produces a compact inventory of APIs expected to support core, high-likelihood tasks, while dynamic reselection further tailors that inventory to observed user needs. This combination improves accuracy and latency while sharply reducing token usage and end-to-end cost, demonstrating the value of user-aligned capability management for efficient web agents.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 18 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2026.
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18 of 23 references.
Closest ancestors · 11
Same direction, newest first
- 2026AutoSurfer -- Teaching Web Agents through Comprehensive Surfing, Learning, and Modeling29 Apr
- 2026WebXSkill: Skill Learning for Autonomous Web Agents14 Apr
- 2026The Tool Illusion: Rethinking Tool Use in Web Agents3 Apr
- 2025SynthAgent: Adapting Web Agents with Synthetic Supervision8 Nov
- 2025WALT: Web Agents that Learn Tools1 Oct
- 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills9 Apr
- 2025Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Tasks9 Apr
- 2025A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models30 Mar
- 2025Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents17 Feb
- 2025Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents: Harnessing Complementary Strengths of Large and Small LLMs11 Feb
- 2024AgentOccam: A Simple Yet Strong Baseline for LLM-Based Web Agents17 Oct
Other references · 7
- 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
- 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 867
- 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 542
- 2026Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnessescited by 309
- 2024Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Taskscited by 232
- 2024OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesiscited by 163
- 2023SteP: Stacked LLM Policies for Web Actionscited by 66
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- 2026CAP: A Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-Site Browser Agents with Complex Actions and Perception
- 2025Build the web for agents, not agents for the web