Hanyu Lai, Xiao Liu, Junjie Gao, Jiale Cheng, Zehan Qi, Yifan Xu, Shuntian Yao, Dan Zhang, Jinhua Du, Zhenyu Hou, Xin Lv, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have ushered in a new era in artificial intelligence, merging capabilities in both language and vision to form highly capable \textbf{Visual Foundation Agents} that are postulated to excel across a myriad of tasks. However, existing benchmarks fail to sufficiently challenge or showcase the full potential of LMMs as visual foundation agents in complex, real-world environments. To address this gap, we introduce VisualAgentBench (VAB), a comprehensive and unified benchmark specifically designed to train and evaluate LMMs as visual foundation agents across diverse scenarios in one standard setting, including Embodied, Graphical User Interface, and Visual Design, with tasks formulated to probe the depth of LMMs' understanding and interaction capabilities. Through rigorous testing across 9 proprietary LMM APIs and 9 open models (18 in total), we demonstrate the considerable yet still developing visual agent capabilities of these models. Additionally, VAB explores the synthesizing of visual agent trajectory data through hybrid methods including Program-based Solvers, LMM Agent Bootstrapping, and Human Demonstrations, offering insights into obstacles, solutions, and trade-offs one may meet in developing open LMM agents. Our work not only aims to benchmark existing models but also provides an instrumental playground for future development into visual foundation agents. Code, train, and test data are available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/VisualAgentBench}.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential as autonomous agents, particularly in web-based tasks. However, existing LLM web agents face significant limitations: high-performing agents rely on expensive proprietary LLM APIs, while open LLMs lack the necessary decision-making capabilities. This paper introduces WebRL, a novel self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning framework designed to train high-performance web agents using open LLMs. Our approach addresses key challenges in this domain, including the scarcity of training tasks, sparse feedback signals, and policy distribution drift in online learning. WebRL incorporates a self-evolving curriculum that generates new tasks from unsuccessful attempts, a robust outcome-supervised reward model (ORM), and adaptive reinforcement learning strategies to ensure consistent improvement. We apply WebRL to transform Llama-3.1 models into proficient web agents, achieving remarkable results on the WebArena-Lite benchmark. Our Llama-3.1-8B agent improves from an initial 4.8\% success rate to 42.4\%, while the Llama-3.1-70B agent achieves a 47.3\% success rate across five diverse websites. These results surpass the performance of GPT-4-Turbo (17.6\%) by over 160\% relatively and significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art web agents trained on open LLMs (AutoWebGLM, 18.2\%). Our findings demonstrate WebRL's effectiveness in bridging the gap between open and proprietary LLM-based web agents, paving the way for more accessible and powerful autonomous web interaction systems.

We present WebGLM, an enhanced Large Language Model (LLM)-based retrieval question-answering system based on the ChatGLM3-6B, offering significant improvements over previous systems. We aim to augment a pre-trained LLM with web search and reliable retrieval capabilities while being efficient for real-world deployments. Leveraging LLM’s in-context learning ability and a robust filter strategy, we create a high-quality training dataset and address the hallucination issue with a self-check mechanism. Our base model, ChatGLM3-6B, excels in extracting critical information and generating desired responses. We tackle the decline in retrieval effectiveness for complex queries with a keywording technique and incorporate more web content for references. We align with user preferences by training a human preference-aware scorer and employing DPO training for direct alignment. Extensive experiments, including human evaluations and the Turing test, demonstrate WebGLM’s superior performance against leading web-enhanced question-answering systems, significantly enhancing performance and efficiency. The code, demo, and data are at https://github.com/THUDM/WebGLM .

Large language models (LLMs) have fueled many intelligent web agents, but most existing ones perform far from satisfying in real-world web navigation tasks due to three factors: (1) the complexity of HTML text data (2) versatility of actions on webpages, and (3) task difficulty due to the open-domain nature of the web. In light of these challenges, we develop the open AutoWebGLM based on ChatGLM3-6B. AutoWebGLM can serve as a powerful automated web navigation agent that outperform GPT-4. Inspired by human browsing patterns, we first design an HTML simplification algorithm to represent webpages with vital information preserved succinctly. We then employ a hybrid human-AI method to build web browsing data for curriculum training. Finally, we bootstrap the model by reinforcement learning and rejection sampling to further facilitate webpage comprehension, browser operations, and efficient task decomposition by itself. For comprehensive evaluation, we establish a bilingual benchmark---AutoWebBench---for real-world web navigation tasks. We evaluate AutoWebGLM across diverse web navigation benchmarks, demonstrating its potential to tackle challenging tasks in real environments. Related code, model, and data are released at https://github.com/THUDM/AutoWebGLM.