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WebChallenger: A Reliable and Efficient Generalist Web Agent

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Blog post: <a href=\"https://x.com/JayooHwang/status/2065481877545521247\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://x.com/JayooHwang/status/2065481877545521247</a></p>\n","updatedAt":"2026-06-12T17:16:41.268Z","author":{"_id":"65e526ba400c626ca0d4f1d4","avatarUrl":"/avatars/f8fe3836bb9e19db8c53c5eb503a5ad2.svg","fullname":"Jayoo Hwang","name":"jayoohwang","type":"user","isPro":false,"isHf":false,"isHfAdmin":false,"isMod":false,"isUserFollowing":false}},"numEdits":0,"identifiedLanguage":{"language":"en","probability":0.6881740689277649},"editors":["jayoohwang"],"editorAvatarUrls":["/avatars/f8fe3836bb9e19db8c53c5eb503a5ad2.svg"],"reactions":[],"isReport":false}}],"primaryEmailConfirmed":false,"paper":{"id":"2606.10423","authors":[{"_id":"6a2ba5d54957fcdd3aac079e","user":{"_id":"65e526ba400c626ca0d4f1d4","avatarUrl":"/avatars/f8fe3836bb9e19db8c53c5eb503a5ad2.svg","isPro":false,"fullname":"Jayoo Hwang","user":"jayoohwang","type":"user","name":"jayoohwang"},"name":"Jayoo Hwang","status":"claimed_verified","statusLastChangedAt":"2026-06-12T06:56:17.626Z","hidden":false},{"_id":"6a2ba5d54957fcdd3aac079f","name":"Xiaowen Zhang","hidden":false},{"_id":"6a2ba5d54957fcdd3aac07a0","name":"Vedant Padwal","hidden":false}],"publishedAt":"2026-06-09T00:00:00.000Z","submittedOnDailyAt":"2026-06-12T00:00:00.000Z","title":"WebChallenger: A Reliable and Efficient Generalist Web Agent","submittedOnDailyBy":{"_id":"65e526ba400c626ca0d4f1d4","avatarUrl":"/avatars/f8fe3836bb9e19db8c53c5eb503a5ad2.svg","isPro":false,"fullname":"Jayoo Hwang","user":"jayoohwang","type":"user","name":"jayoohwang"},"summary":"Autonomous web navigation remains challenging for LLM agents, and the strongest generalist systems rely on proprietary reasoning models whose inference cost is prohibitive for the repetitive tasks where such agents would be most useful. We argue this gap stems not from insufficient model capability but from agent architectures that fail to replicate three human cognitive advantages: selective attention to relevant page regions, persistent memory of website structure, and procedural fluency with common interaction patterns. We introduce WebChallenger, a web agent framework that addresses each gap through architecture design rather than model scale, built around PageMem: a structured page representation deterministically constructed from the DOM that exposes each page as a hierarchy of semantic sections with short summaries. On this shared substrate we build three mechanisms that mirror the three cognitive advantages: a divide-and-conquer observation pipeline that lets the agent skim section summaries and extract details only from task-relevant regions; a lightweight exploration and memory system that traverses each website once to build a reusable map of pages and element behaviors; and compound action workflows that collapse common multi-step interactions into single agent actions, handling partial state changes automatically. Because all three operate over PageMem, the framework generalizes across websites without site-specific adapters. Using off-the-shelf open-weight models without fine-tuning, our system achieves 56.3% on WebArena, 48.7% on VisualWebArena, 51.0% on Online-Mind2Web, and 70.9% on WorkArena, approaching frontier proprietary systems at a fraction of the cost. Our code is released at https://github.com/jayoohwang1/webchallenger","upvotes":0,"discussionId":"6a2ba5d54957fcdd3aac07a1","projectPage":"https://jayoohwang1.github.io/webchallenger-site/","githubRepo":"https://github.com/jayoohwang1/webchallenger","githubRepoAddedBy":"user","ai_summary":"WebChallenger presents a web agent framework that improves autonomous navigation through structured page representation and cognitive-inspired mechanisms, achieving high performance with open-weight models.","ai_keywords":["PageMem","DOM","structured page representation","divide-and-conquer observation pipeline","exploration and memory system","compound action workflows","web agent framework","autonomous web navigation"],"ai_summary_model":"Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct","githubStars":1},"canReadDatabase":false,"canManagePapers":false,"canSubmit":false,"hasHfLevelAccess":false,"upvoted":false,"upvoters":[],"acceptLanguages":["en"],"markdownContentUrl":"https://huggingface.co/buckets/huggingchat/papers-content/resolve/2606/2606.10423.md","query":{}}">
Papers
arxiv:2606.10423

WebChallenger: A Reliable and Efficient Generalist Web Agent

Published on Jun 9
· Submitted by
Jayoo Hwang
on Jun 12
Authors:
,

Abstract

WebChallenger presents a web agent framework that improves autonomous navigation through structured page representation and cognitive-inspired mechanisms, achieving high performance with open-weight models.

Autonomous web navigation remains challenging for LLM agents, and the strongest generalist systems rely on proprietary reasoning models whose inference cost is prohibitive for the repetitive tasks where such agents would be most useful. We argue this gap stems not from insufficient model capability but from agent architectures that fail to replicate three human cognitive advantages: selective attention to relevant page regions, persistent memory of website structure, and procedural fluency with common interaction patterns. We introduce WebChallenger, a web agent framework that addresses each gap through architecture design rather than model scale, built around PageMem: a structured page representation deterministically constructed from the DOM that exposes each page as a hierarchy of semantic sections with short summaries. On this shared substrate we build three mechanisms that mirror the three cognitive advantages: a divide-and-conquer observation pipeline that lets the agent skim section summaries and extract details only from task-relevant regions; a lightweight exploration and memory system that traverses each website once to build a reusable map of pages and element behaviors; and compound action workflows that collapse common multi-step interactions into single agent actions, handling partial state changes automatically. Because all three operate over PageMem, the framework generalizes across websites without site-specific adapters. Using off-the-shelf open-weight models without fine-tuning, our system achieves 56.3% on WebArena, 48.7% on VisualWebArena, 51.0% on Online-Mind2Web, and 70.9% on WorkArena, approaching frontier proprietary systems at a fraction of the cost. Our code is released at https://github.com/jayoohwang1/webchallenger

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