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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.
arXiv:2604. 06367v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web agents automate browser tasks, ranging from simple form completion to complex workflows like ordering groceries.
arXiv:2607. 08147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous web agents promise to automate everyday browsing tasks, but inherit one of the web's oldest attack surfaces.
arXiv:2511. 20597v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into web browsers introduces security challenges that go beyond traditional web application threat models.
The paper investigates how large language model (LLM) search agents can be manipulated through repeated, coordinated search-result injections, a threat that extends beyond single-page poisoning. It introduces Authority‑Chain Hijack (ACH), a strategy that chains manipulated evidence across multiple sources, achieving high attack success rates on the SafeSearch benchmark. The authors also present Trace‑Guided Strategy Evolution (TGSE), an automated method that refines attacker strategies using execution traces, further improving success rates.
arXiv:2602. 09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf.