arXiv AI

WebRider: Persona-Conditioned Intent Controllers for Live-Web Assistance

arXiv:2608. 06704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delegating a web task involves more than asking a question; it requires transferring a policy: what to verify, how to handle uncertainty, which preferences matter, and when to stop.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Guides That Cause Actions: An Offline Study of Guide-Action Mutual Reinforcement in Multimodal Web Agents

The paper introduces WebMRE, an offline benchmark comprising 541 tasks and 5,293 steps extracted from WebArena trajectories, designed to provide deterministic scoring for web agents without live environments. It enables the first systematic study of how guide sentences and grounded actions reinforce each other, showing that jointly decoding a guide improves element selection accuracy and that the guide acts as a causal instruction channel. The authors fine‑tune models that outperform leading zero‑shot baselines on all offline metrics.

By Chengguang Gan, Yunhao Liang, QingHao Zhang, Shiwen Ni
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Web$hell: A Unified Interface for Agentic Web Access

Web$hell is a unified interface that consolidates various web access methods—search, browser actions, and filesystem interactions—into a single model for large language model agents. It uses a WebContract schema to compile live webpages into addressable information and action objects, which are stored in a WebCache and manipulated through shared operations. Experiments across search, navigation, and research tasks show that Web$hell delivers strong performance at lower cost, highlighting the role of interface design in enhancing agentic web access.

By Sunghwan Kim, Deogyong Kim, Sangam Lee, Donguk Kwon, Dongha Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Safe Skill Retirement for Physical Agents

The paper introduces a method for safely retiring procedural guidance in AI agents that control physical actions. It proposes matched authority counterfactuals and a two‑gate retirement certificate to ensure that reductions preserve authorized utility while eliminating unauthorized protected effects. Experiments across multiple models and skill bundles show that task‑certified reductions can remove most skill clauses, but only a combined protocol passes both utility and safety gates in all tested configurations.

By Zhonghao Zhan, Xiao Ma, Hamed Haddadi