VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks
Jing Yu Koh, Robert Lo, Lawrence Jang, Vikram Duvvur, Ming Lim, Po-Yu Huang, Graham Neubig, Shuyan Zhou, Russ Salakhutdinov, Daniel Fried
Abstract
Autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and executing actions on the web offer a promising avenue for automating computer tasks. However, the majority of existing benchmarks primarily focus on text-based agents, neglecting many natural tasks that require visual information to effectively solve. Given that most computer interfaces cater to human perception, visual information often augments textual data in ways that text-only models struggle to harness effectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisualWebArena, a benchmark designed to assess the performance of multimodal web agents on *realistic visually grounded tasks*. VisualWebArena comprises of a set of diverse and complex web-based tasks that evaluate various capabilities of autonomous multimodal agents. To perform on this benchmark, agents need to accurately process image-text inputs, interpret natural language instructions, and execute actions on websites to accomplish user-defined objectives. We conduct an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based autonomous agents, including several multimodal models. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identify several limitations of text-only LLM agents, and reveal gaps in the capabilities of state-of-the-art multimodal language agents. VisualWebArena provides a framework for evaluating multimodal autonomous language agents, and offers insights towards building stronger autonomous agents for the web.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.50
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 881–905
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.50
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jing Yu Koh, Robert Lo, Lawrence Jang, Vikram Duvvur, Ming Lim, Po-Yu Huang, Graham Neubig, Shuyan Zhou, Russ Salakhutdinov, and Daniel Fried. 2024. VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 881–905, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks (Koh et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.50.pdf