WebLists: Extracting Structured Information From Complex Interactive Websites Using Executable LLM Agents

Most recent web agent research has focused on navigation and transaction tasks, with little emphasis on extracting structured data at scale. We present WebLists, a benchmark of 200 data-extraction tasks across four common business and enterprise use-cases. Each task requires an agent to navigate to a webpage, configure it appropriately, and extract complete datasets with well-defined schemas. We show that both LLMs with search capabilities and SOTA web agents struggle with these tasks, with a recall of 3% and 31%, respectively, despite higher performance on question-answering tasks. To address this challenge, we propose BardeenAgent, a novel framework that enables web agents to convert their execution into repeatable programs, and replay them at scale across pages with similar structure. BardeenAgent is also the first LLM agent to take advantage of the regular structure of HTML. In particular BardeenAgent constructs a generalizable CSS selector to capture all relevant items on the page, then fits the operations to extract the data. On the WebLists benchmark, BardeenAgent achieves 66% recall overall, more than doubling the performance of SOTA web agents, and reducing cost per output row by 3x.

WILBUR: Adaptive In-Context Learning for Robust and Accurate Web Agents

In the realm of web agent research, achieving both generalization and accuracy remains a challenging problem. Due to high variance in website structure, existing approaches often fail. Moreover, existing fine-tuning and in-context learning techniques fail to generalize across multiple websites. We introduce Wilbur, an approach that uses a differentiable ranking model and a novel instruction synthesis technique to optimally populate a black-box large language model's prompt with task demonstrations from previous runs. To maximize end-to-end success rates, we also propose an intelligent backtracking mechanism that learns and recovers from its mistakes. Finally, we show that our ranking model can be trained on data from a generative auto-curriculum which samples representative goals from an LLM, runs the agent, and automatically evaluates it, with no manual annotation. Wilbur achieves state-of-the-art results on the WebVoyager benchmark, beating text-only models by 8% overall, and up to 36% on certain websites. On the same benchmark, Wilbur is within 5% of a strong multi-modal model despite only receiving textual inputs, and further analysis reveals a substantial number of failures are due to engineering challenges of operating the web.

BYOC: Personalized Few-Shot Classification with Co-Authored Class Descriptions

Text classification is a well-studied and versatile building block for many NLP applications. Yet, existing approaches require either large annotated corpora to train a model with or, when using large language models as a base, require carefully crafting the prompt as well as using a long context that can fit many examples. As a result, it is not possible for end-users to build classifiers for themselves. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach to few-shot text classification using an LLM. Rather than few-shot examples, the LLM is prompted with descriptions of the salient features of each class. These descriptions are coauthored by the user and the LLM interactively: while the user annotates each few-shot example, the LLM asks relevant questions that the user answers. Examples, questions, and answers are summarized to form the classification prompt. Our experiments show that our approach yields high accuracy classifiers, within 82% of the performance of models trained with significantly larger datasets while using only 1% of their training sets. Additionally, in a study with 30 participants, we show that end-users are able to build classifiers to suit their specific needs. The personalized classifiers show an average accuracy of 90%, which is 15% higher than the state-of-the-art approach.