SteP: Stacked LLM Policies for Web Actions
Authors: name: Paloma Sodhi; name: S. R. K. Branavan; name: Ryan McDonald
Published: 2023-10-05 17:40:09

Abstract: Performing tasks on the web presents fundamental challenges to large language
models (LLMs), including combinatorially large open-world tasks and variations
across web interfaces. Simply specifying a large prompt to handle all possible
behaviors and states is extremely complex, and results in behavior leaks
between unrelated behaviors. Decomposition to distinct policies can address
this challenge, but requires carefully handing off control between policies. We
propose Stacked LLM Policies for Web Actions (SteP), an approach to dynamically
compose policies to solve a diverse set of web tasks. SteP defines a Markov
Decision Process where the state is a stack of policies representing the
control state, i.e., the chain of policy calls. Unlike traditional methods that
are restricted to static hierarchies, SteP enables dynamic control that adapts
to the complexity of the task. We evaluate SteP against multiple baselines and
web environments including WebArena, MiniWoB++, and a CRM. On WebArena, SteP
improves (14.9\% to 33.5\%) over SOTA that use GPT-4 policies, while on
MiniWob++, SteP is competitive with prior works while using significantly less
data. Our code and data are available at
https://asappresearch.github.io/webagents-step.