arXiv AI

WebXSkill: Skill Learning for Autonomous Web Agents

arXiv AI
Sep 10

SCAFFOLD: Self-Improving Web Agents via Recursive Parametric Skill Abstraction

SCAFFOLD is a self‑improving framework for visual web agents that automatically induces parametric, executable skills from successful trajectories and organizes them into a recursively composed hierarchy. It compresses the skill library using a minimum‑description‑length criterion and behavioral equivalence checks, and periodically distills these skills back into model weights to internalize the abstractions. Experiments on WebArena, VisualWebArena, and Online‑Mind2Web show that SCAFFOLD raises success rates by 11.1–17.2 absolute points over the best skill‑augmented baseline and continues to improve across five self‑improvement iterations without collapsing the library.

By Bowei He, Xiaokun Zhang, Meng Ding, Xue Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 27

SkillShift-Bench: Benchmarking Skill Learning under Environment Evolution for Web Agents

SkillShift-Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates web agents’ skill learning under controlled open-environment shifts, including Contextual, Perceptual, and Execution shifts across three self-hosted web systems. It measures task success, interaction cost, skill use, and skill failure, revealing that skill robustness degrades systematically—especially under Execution Shift. The benchmark also frames shifted skill execution as a nonstationary local executability problem, offering a dynamic-regret analysis and a test-time adaptation method to improve skill execution without relearning.

By Bo-Yu Chen, Zhi Zhou, Yu-Feng Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Improving LLM-based Autonomous Web Agents with Filtering

The paper investigates how to improve large language model (LLM) based autonomous web agents by filtering irrelevant webpage content. The authors reproduce baseline models on the WebArena benchmark and identify failure modes caused by raw HTML input. They propose DeBERTa‑ and T5‑based retrieval models that rank HTML elements by relevance, fine‑tuned on Mind2Web data, and demonstrate that the DeBERTa model raises the LLaMA‑2‑70B agent’s success rate from 1.97% to 2.96%. Additionally, a zero‑shot ColBERT retriever achieves recall of 0.52 on Mind2Web and 0.47 on WebArena.

By Zhitong Guo, Jing Yu Koh, Ruiyu Li