AgentOccam: A Simple Yet Strong Baseline for LLM-Based Web Agents

Autonomy via agents based on large language models (LLMs) that can carry out personalized yet standardized tasks presents a significant opportunity to drive human efficiency. There is an emerging need and interest in automating web tasks (e.g., booking a hotel for a given date within a budget). Being a practical use case itself, the web agent also serves as an important proof-of-concept example for various agent grounding scenarios, with its success promising advancements in many future applications. Meanwhile, much prior research focuses on handcrafting their web agent strategies (e.g., agent's prompting templates, reflective workflow, role-play and multi-agent systems, search or sampling methods, etc.) and the corresponding in-context examples. However, these custom strategies often struggle with generalizability across all potential real-world applications. On the other hand, there has been limited study on the misalignment between a web agent's observation and action representation, and the data on which the agent's underlying LLM has been pre-trained. This discrepancy is especially notable when LLMs are primarily trained for language completion rather than tasks involving embodied navigation actions and symbolic web elements. In our study, we enhance an LLM-based web agent by simply refining its observation and action space, aligning these more closely with the LLM's capabilities. This approach enables our base agent to significantly outperform previous methods on a wide variety of web tasks. Specifically, on WebArena, a benchmark featuring general-purpose web interaction tasks, our agent AgentOccam surpasses the previous state-of-the-art and concurrent work by 9.8 (+29.4%) and 5.9 (+15.8%) absolute points respectively, and boosts the success rate by 26.6 points (+161%) over similar plain web agents with its observation and action space alignment. Furthermore, on WebVoyager benchmark comprising tasks defined on real-world websites, AgentOccam exceeds the former best agent by 2.4 points (+4.6%) on tasks with deterministic answers. We achieve this without using in-context examples, new agent roles, online feedback or search strategies. AgentOccam's simple design highlights LLMs' impressive zero-shot performance on web tasks, and underlines the critical role of carefully tuning observation and action spaces for LLM-based agents.