Agentic Test-Time Scaling for WebAgents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12276v1
• Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:58:30 GMT
• Title: Agentic Test-Time Scaling for WebAgents
• Authors: Nicholas Lee, Lutfi Eren Erdogan, Chris Joseph John, Surya Krishnapillai, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami,
• Abstract summary: We present Confidence-Aware Test-Time Scaling (CATTS), which uses vote-derived uncertainty to allocate compute only when decisions are genuinely contentious.<n>CATTS improves performance on WebArena-Lite and GoBrowse by up to 9.1% over React while using up to 2.3x fewer tokens than uniform scaling.
• Score: 65.5178428849495
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Test-time scaling has become a standard way to improve performance and boost reliability of neural network models. However, its behavior on agentic, multi-step tasks remains less well-understood: small per-step errors can compound over long horizons; and we find that naive policies that uniformly increase sampling show diminishing returns. In this work, we present CATTS, a simple technique for dynamically allocating compute for multi-step agents. We first conduct an empirical study of inference-time scaling for web agents. We find that uniformly increasing per-step compute quickly saturates in long-horizon environments. We then investigate stronger aggregation strategies, including an LLM-based Arbiter that can outperform naive voting, but that can overrule high-consensus decisions. We show that uncertainty statistics derived from the agent's own vote distribution (entropy and top-1/top-2 margin) correlate with downstream success and provide a practical signal for dynamic compute allocation. Based on these findings, we introduce Confidence-Aware Test-Time Scaling (CATTS), which uses vote-derived uncertainty to allocate compute only when decisions are genuinely contentious. CATTS improves performance on WebArena-Lite and GoBrowse by up to 9.1% over React while using up to 2.3x fewer tokens than uniform scaling, providing both efficiency gains and an interpretable decision rule.

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