AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?
Paper · 2024 · Ori Yoran, Samuel Joseph Amouyal, Chaitanya Malaviya et al.
Summary
The paper asks whether LM-based web agents can handle realistic, multi-step information-seeking tasks on the open web, such as tracking housing prices or finding a nearby gym with a suitable class schedule. The authors built AssistantBench, a set of 214 tasks with closed-form answers that can be scored automatically. The tasks came from three sources: participants describing their own recent browsing needs, crowdworkers creating variants of those tasks, and domain experts recruited via Prolific contributing professional tasks. Solving them involves more than 525 pages on 258 websites. The authors tested closed-book LMs, retrieval-augmented LMs and the SeeAct agent. They also introduced SeePlanAct (SPA), which extends SeeAct with a planning module and a memory buffer. No system scored above 25 accuracy points. Closed-book models had the best accuracy but frequently hallucinated and had low precision. Existing web agents scored close to zero, and SPA clearly outperformed them. Combining SPA with a closed-book model in an ensemble gave the best results. The benchmark shows that navigating the open web is still a major unsolved problem for agents.
Key points
- AssistantBench contains 214 tasks from 53 contributors, 35 of them domain experts. By source, there are 72 seed tasks from 18 participants, 102 crowdworker-generated variants and 42 expert tasks. Code, data and a leaderboard are available at assistantbench.github.io.
- SPA improves on SeeAct by about 7 points. It answers twice as many questions, with precision about 5 points higher.
- Navigation mistakes, such as following the wrong path or getting stuck in loops, cause 60% of SeeAct errors and 37% of SPA errors.
- Hallucinated facts account for 85% of closed-book model errors. Failed retrieval accounts for 80% of retrieval-augmented model errors.
- All agents are built on GPT4-Turbo and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Time-dependent tasks were excluded because their answers cannot be verified automatically.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 works
Cite
Cite as Ori Yoran, Samuel Joseph Amouyal, Chaitanya Malaviya, Ben Bogin, Ofir Press and Jonathan Berant. 2024. AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
@inproceedings{yoran2024assistantbench,
title = {{AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks?}},
author = {Ori Yoran, Samuel Joseph Amouyal, Chaitanya Malaviya, Ben Bogin, Ofir Press and Jonathan Berant},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.505},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.505}
}References
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