Agent-E: From Autonomous Web Navigation to Foundational Design Principles in Agentic Systems
Keywords: Web Automation, Autonomous Agents, Self-Improvement, Hierarchical Architecture
Abstract: Web agents that can automate complex and monotonous tasks are becoming essential in streamlining workflows. Due to the difficulty of long-horizon planning, abundant state spaces in websites, and their cryptic observation space (i.e. DOMs), current web agents are still far from human-level performance. In this paper, we present a novel web agent, Agent-E. This agentic system introduces several architectural improvements over prior state-of-the-art web agents, such as hierarchical architecture, self-refinement, flexible DOM distillation, and *change observation* to guide the agent towards more accurate performance. Our Agent-E system without self-refinement achieves SOTA results on the WebVoyager benchmark, beating prior text-only benchmarks by over 20.5\% and multimodal agents by over 16\%. Our results indicate that adding a self-refinement mechanism can provide an additional 5.9\% improvement on the Agent-E system without self-refinement. We then synthesize our learnings into general design principles for developing agentic systems. These include the use of domain-specific primitive skills, the importance of state-sensing and distillation of complex environmental observations, and the advantages of a hierarchical architecture.
Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
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Submission Number: 3884
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