Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for
  Multimodal Web Agents
Authors: name: Vardaan Pahuja; name: Yadong Lu; name: Corby Rosset; name: Boyu Gou; name: Arindam Mitra; name: Spencer Whitehead; name: Yu Su; name: Ahmed Awadallah
Published: 2025-02-17 02:13:48

Abstract: Recent success in large multimodal models (LMMs) has sparked promising
applications of agents capable of autonomously completing complex web tasks.
While open-source LMM agents have made significant advances in offline
evaluation benchmarks, their performance still falls substantially short of
human-level capabilities in more realistic online settings. A key bottleneck is
the lack of diverse and large-scale trajectory-level datasets across various
domains, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we address this
challenge by developing a scalable recipe to synthesize the largest and most
diverse trajectory-level dataset to date, containing over 94K successful
multimodal web trajectories, spanning 49K unique URLs, 720K screenshots, and
33M web elements. In particular, we leverage extensive web exploration and
refinement to obtain diverse task intents. The average cost is 28 cents per
successful trajectory, making it affordable to a wide range of users in the
community. Leveraging this dataset, we train Explorer, a multimodal web agent,
and demonstrate strong performance on both offline and online web agent
benchmarks such as Mind2Web-Live, Multimodal-Mind2Web, and MiniWob++.
Additionally, our experiments highlight data scaling as a key driver for
improving web agent capabilities. We hope this study makes state-of-the-art
LMM-based agent research at a larger scale more accessible.