HackerPapers

arXiv:2601.02439cs.LG

WebGym: Scaling Training Environments for Visual Web Agents with Realistic Tasks

Hao Bai, Alexey Taymanov, Tong Zhang, Aviral Kumar, Spencer Whitehead

HN submission. Found in a submission link or body. Submitters do not count as commenters in the main ranking; a submission is not an endorsement.

Abstract

We present WebGym, the largest-to-date open-source environment for training realistic visual web agents. Real websites are non-stationary and diverse, making artificial or small-scale task sets insufficient for robust policy learning. WebGym contains nearly 300,000 tasks with rubric-based evaluations across diverse, real-world websites and difficulty levels. We train agents with a simple reinforcement learning (RL) recipe, which trains on the agent's own interaction traces (rollouts), using task rewards as feedback to guide learning. To enable scaling RL, we speed up sampling of trajectories in WebGym by developing a high-throughput asynchronous rollout system, designed specifically for web agents. Our system achieves a 4-5x rollout speedup compared to naive implementations. Second, we scale the task set breadth, depth, and size, which results in continued performance improvement. Fine-tuning a strong base vision-language model, Qwen-3-VL-8B-Instruct, on WebGym results in an improvement in success rate on an out-of-distribution test set from 26.2% to 42.9%, significantly outperforming agents based on proprietary models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5-Thinking that achieve 27.1% and 29.8%, respectively. This improvement is substantial because our test set consists only of tasks on websites never seen during training, unlike many other prior works on training visual web agents.

arXiv comments
Completed acknowledgements
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning cs.CVComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition

On Hacker News

No comments linking this paper were found in the collected sources. Found in 1 HN submission from Jan 2026 to Jan 2026. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments0 threads

No comments linking this paper were found in the collected sources. Open submission discussions.

Submitted to Hacker News

Connected through shared HN threads, not inferred similarity or a recommendation.