arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Improving LLM-based Autonomous Web Agents with Filtering

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2609.27770 (cs)
[Submitted on 16 Aug 2026]

Title:Improving LLM-based Autonomous Web Agents with Filtering

View a PDF of the paper titled Improving LLM-based Autonomous Web Agents with Filtering, by Zhitong Guo and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Autonomous web agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), have garnered significant attention for automating various web-based tasks with multi-step reasoning and decision-making capabilities. An open research question in the development of these agents lies in the format of the webpage input. Raw HTML source code, with its extensive and often irrelevant details, poses difficulties for LLMs with limited context windows. To address this challenge, we first reproduce baseline models such as GPT-3.5 and LLaMA-2-70B on the WebArena (Zhou et al., 2023) benchmark, identifying common failure modes. We then propose two retrieval strategies to filter out irrelevant context for LLM agents. We develop DeBERTa-based and T5-based models that rank HTML elements by their relevance to the task. We fine-tune them on Mind2Web trajectory data and transfer them to WebArena. Experiments show that our DeBERTa-based model improves the success rate of the LLaMA-2-70B LLM agent on WebArena from 1.97% to 2.96%. Moreover, we develop a zero-shot ColBERT-based retriever that is able to retrieve the ground-truth element with a recall of 0.52 on Mind2Web and 0.47 on WebArena.
Comments: All authors contributed equally to this work and are co-first authors. We conducted the initial research for this paper in 2023
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.27770 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2609.27770v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27770
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Ruiyu Li [view email]
[v1] Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:54:53 UTC (7,406 KB)
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