WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents
Authors: name: Shuyan Zhou; name: Frank F. Xu; name: Hao Zhu; name: Xuhui Zhou; name: Robert Lo; name: Abishek Sridhar; name: Xianyi Cheng; name: Yonatan Bisk; name: Daniel Fried; name: Uri Alon; name: Graham Neubig
Published: 2023-07-25 22:59:32

Abstract: With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to
manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent
agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments,
substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we
build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and
reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites,
and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common
domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software
development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools
(e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage
human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of
benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task
completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are
designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We
design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques
such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex
tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end
task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further
development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from
perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to
measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and
video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.