The paper introduces Discriminative World Models for Web Agents, proposing a predicted-state matching objective that trains world models to produce representations that can distinguish the true resulting state from those of alternative actions. Using a branching dataset from WebArena Go-Browse, the authors demonstrate that this approach outperforms traditional supervised next-state prediction on a held‑out benchmark and improves action ranking on WebPRMBench. Additionally, employing the discriminative world model for test‑time action selection boosts end‑to‑end task success on WebArena‑Lite.
By Kelvin Li, Dhruv Pendharkar, Anish Pahilajani, Chuyi Shang, Leon Oks, Leonid Karlinsky, Rogerio Feris, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig
The paper introduces a new training paradigm for text-based world models that prioritizes behavior consistency over traditional state consistency metrics. It proposes the Behavior Consistency Reward (BehR), a step-level metric that evaluates how the likelihood of a logged next action changes between real and predicted states using a frozen Reference Agent. Experiments on WebShop and TextWorld demonstrate that BehR-based training improves long-term alignment, reduces false positives in offline evaluation, and yields modest gains in lookahead planning while maintaining or enhancing single-step prediction quality.
By Youling Huang, Guanqiao Chen, Junchi Yao, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Chao Du, ChenZhuo Zhao, Pu Zhao, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
WorldAgen is a unified framework that jointly learns world modeling and action prediction using a shared Transformer backbone with two specialized heads. It introduces a Mixed Unidirectional Attention Mask to separate the world model and agent model, and enables Test-Time Training (TTT) by sampling exploratory actions and updating the world model with real state transitions. Experiments on CALVIN and LIBERO show that WorldAgen matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods, especially when TTT is applied to a few samples.
By Chi Wan, Kangrui Wang, Yuan Si, Pingyue Zhang, Manling Li
AD-WM is a new action‑discriminative joint‑embedding world model designed for counterfactual model predictive control. It augments residual latent dynamics with action‑recovery regularization based on inverse dynamics and conditional mutual information, while discarding auxiliary heads at test time so that MPC remains unchanged. Experiments on OGBench‑Cube and other simulation environments show substantial gains in hard‑start success and mean success, and zero‑shot transfer to a Franka robot improves pick‑and‑place success from 42.2% to 71.1%.
By Jiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
arXiv:2608. 00335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compact web agents can reduce deployment cost, but training them poses challenges in both data collection and post-SFT reinforcement learning (RL).
By Chengbo Liu, Lifang Zhou, Ruijie Yan, Pei Tan, Ao Sun, Haojun Huang, Guichun Hua, Sining Wei, Yining Chen, Yingying He, Yutao Xie
The paper introduces CoPE, a method that trains language agents by adding multi‑step action targets to the policy backbone. By supervising each action forecasted from preceding histories, CoPE enables acting and forecasting to co‑evolve without extra inference cost. Across five benchmarks, CoPE outperforms existing RL baselines, achieving up to twice the sample efficiency on ScienceWorld and improving overall performance on realistic applications.
By Haofei Yu, Yixing Chen, Yining Zhao, Xuyan Ye, Yuxiang Liu, Zhigang Hua, Yan Xie, Shuang Yang, Jiaxuan You
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
arXiv:2606. 09961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents via reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled frontier models to achieve superhuman performance in long-horizon tasks.
By Yu Han, Kailing Li, Yang Jiao, Yulin Dai, Yuqian Fu, Linhai Zhuo, Tianwen Qian
arXiv:2610.16319v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Real-world hybrid web tasks need both information gathering and page interaction, yet search-based and operation-based agents are developed and evaluat...
By Zijian Cai, Haowei Liu, Kailai Chen, Lin Peng, Cong Wan, Ziqi Zhang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu, Haiyang Xu
arXiv:2603.23184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), existing reward modeling methods largely rely on explicit feedback,...
By Hao Wang, Haocheng Yang, Licheng Pan, Lei Shen, Xiaoxi Li, Yinuo Wang, Zhichao Chen, Yuan Lu, Haoxuan Li, Zhouchen Lin
arXiv:2610.35823v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Browser agents do not just need more practice. They need to practice the right things. We introduce MiniWeb, a realistic miniature of the web comprisin...
By Minh Pham-Dinh, Md Farhan Ishmam, Hernan Yupanqui, Reaz Hassan Joarder, Kenneth Marino
arXiv:2607. 27973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for the post-training of Large Language Model (LLM) agents.
By Cong Li, Peixi Peng, Yisen Zhao, Xinyu Hu, Shudong Liu, Zhan Su, Zhuojian Li