Megh Thakkar

Khyati Mahajan

Vikas Yadav

Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan

Alexandre Piché

Dzmitry Bahdanau

Chris Pal

David Vazquez

Enamul Hoque

Perouz Taslakian

Sai Rajeswar

Spandana Gella

2025-07-07

colmweb.org/COLM/2025/Conference (accepté)

How to Train Your LLM Web Agent: A Statistical Diagnosis

Dheeraj Vattikonda

Santhoshi Ravichandran

Emiliano Penaloza

Hadi Nekoei

Nicolas Gontier

Miguel Muñoz-Mármol

Stefania Raimondo

Alexandre Piché

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Large language model (LLM) agents for web interfaces have advanced rapidly, yet open-source systems still lag behind proprietary agents. Bri… (voir plus)dging this gap is key to enabling customizable, efficient, and privacy-preserving agents. Two challenges hinder progress: the reproducibility issues in RL and LLM agent training, where results often depend on sensitive factors like seeds and decoding parameters, and the focus of prior work on single-step tasks, overlooking the complexities of web-based, multi-step decision-making. We address these gaps by providing a statistically driven study of training LLM agents for web tasks. Our two-stage pipeline combines imitation learning from a Llama 3.3 70B teacher with on-policy fine-tuning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on a Llama 3.1 8B student. Through 240 configuration sweeps and rigorous bootstrapping, we chart the first compute allocation curve for open-source LLM web agents. Our findings show that dedicating one-third of compute to teacher traces and the rest to RL improves MiniWoB++ success by 6 points and closes 60% of the gap to GPT-4o on WorkArena, while cutting GPU costs by 45%. We introduce a principled hyperparameter sensitivity analysis, offering actionable guidelines for robust and cost-effective agent training.

2025-06-08

ICML.cc/2025/Workshop/WCUA (présentation orale)

How to Train Your LLM Web Agent: A Statistical Diagnosis

Dheeraj Vattikonda

Santhoshi Ravichandran

Emiliano Penaloza

Hadi Nekoei

Nicolas Gontier

Miguel Muñoz-Mármol

Stefania Raimondo

Alexandre Piché

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

LLM-based web agents have recently made significant progress, but much of it has occurred in closed-source systems, widening the gap with op… (voir plus)en-source alternatives. Progress has been held back by two key challenges: first, a narrow focus on single-step tasks that overlooks the complexity of multi-step web interactions; and second, the high compute costs required to post-train LLM-based web agents. To address this, we present the first statistically grounded study on compute allocation for LLM web-agent post-training. Our approach uses a two-stage pipeline, training a Llama 3.1 8B student to imitate a Llama 3.3 70B teacher via supervised fine-tuning (SFT), followed by on-policy reinforcement learning. We find this process highly sensitive to hyperparameter choices, making exhaustive sweeps impractical. To spare others from expensive trial-and-error, we sample 1,370 configurations and use bootstrapping to estimate effective hyperparameters. Our results show that combining SFT with on-policy RL consistently outperforms either approach alone on both WorkArena and MiniWob++. Further, this strategy requires only 55% of the compute to match the peak performance of pure SFT on MiniWob++, effectively pushing the compute-performance Pareto frontier, and is the only strategy that can close the gap with closed-source models.

2025-06-08

ICML.cc/2025/Workshop/WCUA (présentation orale)

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors Provides Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

Quentin Fournier

Matthew D Riemer

Pin-Yu Chen

Amal Zouaq

Payel Das

Sarath Chandar

2025-01-01

Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) (publié)

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Lawrence Keunho Jang

Ori Yoran

Dehan Kong

Frank F. Xu

Graham Neubig

Russ Salakhutdinov

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging a… (voir plus)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.

2025-01-01

Trans. Mach. Learn. Res. (publié)

Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models

Mohammad Reza Samsami

M. L. Richter

Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.

2024-12-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models

Mohammad Reza Samsami

M. L. Richter

Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.

2024-12-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models

Mohammad Reza Samsami

Mats Leon Richter

Juan A. Rodriguez

Sarath Chandar

Maxime Gasse

Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.

2024-12-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models

Mohammad Reza Samsami

M. L. Richter

Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.

2024-12-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Lawrence Jang

Ori Yoran

Dehan Kong

Frank F. Xu

Graham Neubig

Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging a… (voir plus)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 (prépublication)

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Lawrence Jang

Ori Yoran

Dehan Kong

Frank F. Xu

Graham Neubig

Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging a… (voir plus)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 (prépublication)

The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Research

Alexandre Lacoste

Massimo Caccia

Lawrence Jang

Ori Yoran

Dehan Kong

Frank F. Xu

Graham Neubig

Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The BrowserGym ecosystem addresses the growing need for efficient evaluation and benchmarking of web agents, particularly those leveraging a… (voir plus)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 (prépublication)