WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Co-evolving World Model
Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Zhisong Zhang, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu
Abstract
Agent self-improvement, where agents autonomously train their underlying Large Language Model (LLM) on self-sampled trajectories, shows promising results but often stagnates in web environments due to limited exploration and under-utilization of pretrained web knowledge. To improve the performance of self-improvement, we propose a novel framework that introduces a co-evolving World Model LLM. This world model predicts the next observation based on the current observation and action within the web environment. The World Model serves dual roles: (1) as a virtual web server generating self-instructed training data to continuously refine the agent's policy, and (2) as an imagination engine during inference, enabling look-ahead simulation to guide action selection for the agent LLM. Experiments in real-world web environments (Mind2Web-Live, WebVoyager, and GAIAweb) show a 10% performance gain over existing self-evolving agents, demonstrating the efficacy and generalizability of our approach, without using any distillation from more powerful close-sourced models 1 .
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Cited by top-tier papers5
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- Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI GroundingWenkai Wang, Xiyun Li, Hongcan Guo, Wenhao Yu et al.ACL 2026 · 1 citation
- PACE: Predictive Adaptive Context Extraction for Long-Horizon LLM AgentsLei Wei, Xiao Peng, TT, Guannan Zhang et al.ACL 2026
- WebSynthesis: World Model-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search for Efficient WebAgent Trajectory SynthesisYifei Gao, Junhong Ye, Yifan Yang, Jiaqi Wang et al.ACL 2026
- Co-EPG: A Framework for Co-Evolution of Planning and Grounding in Autonomous GUI AgentsYuan Zhao, Hualei Zhu, Tingyu Jiang, Shen Li et al.AAAI 2026
Builds on20
- Reflexion: language agents with verbal reinforcement learningNoah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Ashwin Gopinath, Karthik Narasimhan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 5,828 citations
- WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language AgentsShunyu Yao, Howard Chen, John Yang, Karthik NarasimhanNeurIPS 2022 · 1,477 citations
- STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With ReasoningEric Zelikman, Yuhuai Wu, Jesse Mu, Noah D. GoodmanNeurIPS 2022 · 1,126 citations
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- Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated InstructionsYizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu et al.ACL 2023 · 540 citations
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