Promoting Sustainable Web Agents: Benchmarking and Estimating Energy Consumption through Empirical and Theoretical Analysis

Web agents, like OpenAI's Operator and Google's Project Mariner, are powerful agentic systems pushing the boundaries of Large Language Models (LLM). They can autonomously interact with the internet at the user's behest, such as navigating websites, filling search masks, and comparing price lists. Though web agent research is thriving, induced sustainability issues remain largely unexplored. To highlight the urgency of this issue, we provide an initial exploration of the energy and $CO_2$ cost associated with web agents from both a theoretical -via estimation- and an empirical perspective -by benchmarking. Our results show how different philosophies in web agent creation can severely impact the associated expended energy, and that more energy consumed does not necessarily equate to better results. We highlight a lack of transparency regarding disclosing model parameters and processes used for some web agents as a limiting factor when estimating energy consumption. Our work contributes towards a change in thinking of how we evaluate web agents, advocating for dedicated metrics measuring energy consumption in benchmarks.

Human in the Latent Loop (HILL): Interactively Guiding Model Training Through Human Intuition

Latent space representations are critical for understanding and improving the behavior of machine learning models, yet they often remain obscure and intricate. Understanding and exploring the latent space has the potential to contribute valuable human intuition and expertise about respective domains. In this work, we present HILL, an interactive framework allowing users to incorporate human intuition into the model training by interactively reshaping latent space representations. The modifications are infused into the model training loop via a novel approach inspired by knowledge distillation, treating the user's modifications as a teacher to guide the model in reshaping its intrinsic latent representation. The process allows the model to converge more effectively and overcome inefficiencies, as well as provide beneficial insights to the user. We evaluated HILL in a user study tasking participants to train an optimal model, closely observing the employed strategies. The results demonstrated that human-guided latent space modifications enhance model performance while maintaining generalization, yet also revealing the risks of including user biases. Our work introduces a novel human-AI interaction paradigm that infuses human intuition into model training and critically examines the impact of human intervention on training strategies and potential biases.