How to Train Your LLM Web Agent: A Statistical Diagnosis

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04103v1
• Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:12:33 GMT
• Title: How to Train Your LLM Web Agent: A Statistical Diagnosis
• Authors: Dheeraj Vattikonda, Santhoshi Ravichandran, Emiliano Penaloza, Hadi Nekoei, Megh Thakkar, Thibault Le Sellier de Chezelles, Nicolas Gontier, Miguel Muñoz-Mármol, Sahar Omidi Shayegan, Stefania Raimondo, Xue Liu, Alexandre Drouin, Laurent Charlin, Alexandre Piché, Alexandre Lacoste, Massimo Caccia,
• Abstract summary: We present the first statistically grounded study on compute allocation for LLM web-agent post-training.<n>Our approach uses a two-stage pipeline, training a Llama 3.1 8B student to imitate a Llama 3.3 70B teacher via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and on-policy reinforcement learning.<n>Our results show that combining SFT with on-policy RL consistently outperforms either approach alone on both WorkArena and MiniWob++.
• Score: 102.04125085041473
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: LLM-based web agents have recently made significant progress, but much of it has occurred in closed-source systems, widening the gap with open-source alternatives. Progress has been held back by two key challenges: first, a narrow focus on single-step tasks that overlooks the complexity of multi-step web interactions; and second, the high compute costs required to post-train LLM-based web agents. To address this, we present the first statistically grounded study on compute allocation for LLM web-agent post-training. Our approach uses a two-stage pipeline, training a Llama 3.1 8B student to imitate a Llama 3.3 70B teacher via supervised fine-tuning (SFT), followed by on-policy reinforcement learning. We find this process highly sensitive to hyperparameter choices, making exhaustive sweeps impractical. To spare others from expensive trial-and-error, we sample 1,370 configurations and use bootstrapping to estimate effective hyperparameters. Our results show that combining SFT with on-policy RL consistently outperforms either approach alone on both WorkArena and MiniWob++. Further, this strategy requires only 55% of the compute to match the peak performance of pure SFT on MiniWob++, effectively pushing the compute-performance Pareto frontier, and is the only strategy that can close the gap with closed-source models.

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