Nicolas Chapados

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Léo Boisvert

Megh Thakkar

Tom Marty

Rim Assouel

Sahar Omidi Shayegan

Lawrence Jang

Xing Han Lu

Ori Yoran

Dehan Kong

Frank F. Xu

Siva Reddy

Quentin Cappart

Graham Neubig

Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging a… (see more)utomation and Large Language Models (LLMs) for web interaction tasks. Many existing benchmarks suffer from fragmentation and inconsistent evaluation methodologies, making it challenging to achieve reliable comparisons and reproducible results. BrowserGym aims to solve this by providing a unified, gym-like environment with well-defined observation and action spaces, facilitating standardized evaluation across diverse benchmarks. Combined with AgentLab, a complementary framework that aids in agent creation, testing, and analysis, BrowserGym offers flexibility for integrating new benchmarks while ensuring consistent evaluation and comprehensive experiment management. This standardized approach seeks to reduce the time and complexity of developing web agents, supporting more reliable comparisons and facilitating in-depth analysis of agent behaviors, and could result in more adaptable, capable agents, ultimately accelerating innovation in LLM-driven automation. As a supporting evidence, we conduct the first large-scale, multi-benchmark web agent experiment and compare the performance of 6 state-of-the-art LLMs across all benchmarks currently available in BrowserGym. Among other findings, our results highlight a large discrepancy between OpenAI and Anthropic's latests models, with Claude-3.5-Sonnet leading the way on almost all benchmarks, except on vision-related tasks where GPT-4o is superior. Despite these advancements, our results emphasize that building robust and efficient web agents remains a significant challenge, due to the inherent complexity of real-world web environments and the limitations of current models.

2024-12-06

ArXiv (preprint)

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

Thibault Le Sellier de Chezelles

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Léo Boisvert

Megh Thakkar

Tom Marty

Rim Assouel

Sahar Omidi Shayegan

Lawrence Jang

Xing Han Lu

Ori Yoran

Dehan Kong

Frank F. Xu

Siva Reddy

Quentin Cappart

Graham Neubig

Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging a… (see more)utomation and Large Language Models (LLMs) for web interaction tasks. Many existing benchmarks suffer from fragmentation and inconsistent evaluation methodologies, making it challenging to achieve reliable comparisons and reproducible results. BrowserGym aims to solve this by providing a unified, gym-like environment with well-defined observation and action spaces, facilitating standardized evaluation across diverse benchmarks. Combined with AgentLab, a complementary framework that aids in agent creation, testing, and analysis, BrowserGym offers flexibility for integrating new benchmarks while ensuring consistent evaluation and comprehensive experiment management. This standardized approach seeks to reduce the time and complexity of developing web agents, supporting more reliable comparisons and facilitating in-depth analysis of agent behaviors, and could result in more adaptable, capable agents, ultimately accelerating innovation in LLM-driven automation. As a supporting evidence, we conduct the first large-scale, multi-benchmark web agent experiment and compare the performance of 6 state-of-the-art LLMs across all benchmarks currently available in BrowserGym. Among other findings, our results highlight a large discrepancy between OpenAI and Anthropic's latests models, with Claude-3.5-Sonnet leading the way on almost all benchmarks, except on vision-related tasks where GPT-4o is superior. Despite these advancements, our results emphasize that building robust and efficient web agents remains a significant challenge, due to the inherent complexity of real-world web environments and the limitations of current models.

2024-12-06

ArXiv (preprint)

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

Thibault Le Sellier de Chezelles

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Léo Boisvert

Megh Thakkar

Tom Marty

Rim Assouel

Sahar Omidi Shayegan

Lawrence Jang

Xing Han Lu

Ori Yoran

Dehan Kong

Frank F. Xu

Siva Reddy

Quentin Cappart

Graham Neubig

Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging a… (see more)utomation and Large Language Models (LLMs) for web interaction tasks. Many existing benchmarks suffer from fragmentation and inconsistent evaluation methodologies, making it challenging to achieve reliable comparisons and reproducible results. BrowserGym aims to solve this by providing a unified, gym-like environment with well-defined observation and action spaces, facilitating standardized evaluation across diverse benchmarks. Combined with AgentLab, a complementary framework that aids in agent creation, testing, and analysis, BrowserGym offers flexibility for integrating new benchmarks while ensuring consistent evaluation and comprehensive experiment management. This standardized approach seeks to reduce the time and complexity of developing web agents, supporting more reliable comparisons and facilitating in-depth analysis of agent behaviors, and could result in more adaptable, capable agents, ultimately accelerating innovation in LLM-driven automation. As a supporting evidence, we conduct the first large-scale, multi-benchmark web agent experiment and compare the performance of 6 state-of-the-art LLMs across all benchmarks currently available in BrowserGym. Among other findings, our results highlight a large discrepancy between OpenAI and Anthropic's latests models, with Claude-3.5-Sonnet leading the way on almost all benchmarks, except on vision-related tasks where GPT-4o is superior. Despite these advancements, our results emphasize that building robust and efficient web agents remains a significant challenge, due to the inherent complexity of real-world web environments and the limitations of current models.

2024-12-06

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan Rodriguez

Xiangru Jian

Siba Smarak Panigrahi

Tianyu Zhang

Aarash Feizi

Abhay Puri

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Ahmed Masry

Shravan Nayak

Rabiul Awal

Mahsa Massoud

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Zichao Li

Suyuchen Wang

Pierre-Andre Noel

Mats Leon Richter

Saverio Vadacchino

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Ying Zhang

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Perouz Taslakian

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan Rodriguez

Xiangru Jian

Siba Smarak Panigrahi

Tianyu Zhang

Aarash Feizi

Abhay Puri

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Ahmed Masry

Shravan Nayak

Rabiul Awal

Mahsa Massoud

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Zichao Li

Suyuchen Wang

Pierre-Andre Noel

M. L. Richter

Saverio Vadacchino

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Ying Zhang

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharagani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Perouz Taslakian

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan Rodriguez

Xiangru Jian

Siba Smarak Panigrahi

Tianyu Zhang

Aarash Feizi

Abhay Puri

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Ahmed Masry

Shravan Nayak

Rabiul Awal

Mahsa Massoud

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Zichao Li

Suyuchen Wang

Pierre-Andre Noel

M. L. Richter

Saverio Vadacchino

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Ying Zhang

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharagani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Perouz Taslakian

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan Rodriguez

Xiangru Jian

Siba Smarak Panigrahi

Tianyu Zhang

Aarash Feizi

Abhay Puri

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Ahmed Masry

Shravan Nayak

Rabiul Awal

Mahsa Massoud

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Zichao Li

Suyuchen Wang

Pierre-Andre Noel

Mats Leon Richter

Saverio Vadacchino

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Ying Zhang

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Perouz Taslakian

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan Rodriguez

Xiangru Jian

Siba Smarak Panigrahi

Tianyu Zhang

Aarash Feizi

Abhay Puri

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Ahmed Masry

Shravan Nayak

Rabiul Awal

Mahsa Massoud

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Zichao Li

Suyuchen Wang

Pierre-Andre Noel

Mats Leon Richter

Saverio Vadacchino

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Ying Zhang

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Perouz Taslakian

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information

Andrew Robert Williams

Arjun Ashok

Étienne Marcotte

Valentina Zantedeschi

Jithendaraa Subramanian

Roland Riachi

James Requeima

Alexandre Lacoste

Irina Rish

Forecasting is a critical task in decision making across various domains. While numerical data provides a foundation, it often lacks crucial… (see more) context necessary for accurate predictions. Human forecasters frequently rely on additional information, such as background knowledge or constraints, which can be efficiently communicated through natural language. However, the ability of existing forecasting models to effectively integrate this textual information remains an open question. To address this, we introduce"Context is Key"(CiK), a time series forecasting benchmark that pairs numerical data with diverse types of carefully crafted textual context, requiring models to integrate both modalities. We evaluate a range of approaches, including statistical models, time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasters, and propose a simple yet effective LLM prompting method that outperforms all other tested methods on our benchmark. Our experiments highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information, demonstrate surprising performance when using LLM-based forecasting models, and also reveal some of their critical shortcomings. By presenting this benchmark, we aim to advance multimodal forecasting, promoting models that are both accurate and accessible to decision-makers with varied technical expertise. The benchmark can be visualized at https://servicenow.github.io/context-is-key-forecasting/v0/ .

2024-10-24

ArXiv (preprint)

Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information

Andrew Robert Williams

Arjun Ashok

Étienne Marcotte

Valentina Zantedeschi

Jithendaraa Subramanian

Roland Riachi

James Requeima

Alexandre Lacoste

Irina Rish

Forecasting is a critical task in decision making across various domains. While numerical data provides a foundation, it often lacks crucial… (see more) context necessary for accurate predictions. Human forecasters frequently rely on additional information, such as background knowledge or constraints, which can be efficiently communicated through natural language. However, the ability of existing forecasting models to effectively integrate this textual information remains an open question. To address this, we introduce"Context is Key"(CiK), a time series forecasting benchmark that pairs numerical data with diverse types of carefully crafted textual context, requiring models to integrate both modalities. We evaluate a range of approaches, including statistical models, time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasters, and propose a simple yet effective LLM prompting method that outperforms all other tested methods on our benchmark. Our experiments highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information, demonstrate surprising performance when using LLM-based forecasting models, and also reveal some of their critical shortcomings. By presenting this benchmark, we aim to advance multimodal forecasting, promoting models that are both accurate and accessible to decision-makers with varied technical expertise. The benchmark can be visualized at https://servicenow.github.io/context-is-key-forecasting/v0/ .

2024-10-24

ArXiv (preprint)

Fine-Tuning Web Agents: It Works, But It's Trickier Than You Think

Massimo Caccia

Megh Thakkar

Léo Boisvert

Thibault Le Sellier de Chezelles

Alexandre Piché

Alexandre Lacoste

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in developing autonomous web agents capable of performing digital … (see more)tasks through web interfaces in a human-like manner. However, even the strongest closed-source models often struggle to achieve robust results on several benchmarks, while a notable performance gap exists between them and open-source counterparts. This study investigates the potential of fine-tuning to enhance the performance of a smaller, lower-performing but cost-efficient LLM by leveraging successful traces from stronger LLMs, referred to as experts. We outline a comprehensive pipeline for data collection, filtering, and supervised fine-tuning and explore various behavior cloning parameters. Our experiments provide key insights into the challenges of fine-tuning LLMs into web agents on benchmarks like MiniWoB and WorkArena. Notably, we find that the fine-tuned agents' ability to predict expert trajectories does not consistently lead to improved downstream task performance. This raises issues such as off-policy bias and the loss of reasoning abilities during fine-tuning. We discuss potential solutions to these challenges and make both the codebase and a dataset of 140M tokens open-source for the community to build upon.

2024-10-22

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/OWA (poster)

openreview.net

Fine-Tuning Web Agents: It Works, But It's Trickier Than You Think

Massimo Caccia

Megh Thakkar

Léo Boisvert

Thibault Le Sellier de Chezelles

Alexandre Piché