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Main Authors: He, Shiqi, Cui, Yue, Ma, Xinyu, Li, Yaliang, Ding, Bolin, Chowdhury, Mosharaf
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19838
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author He, Shiqi
Cui, Yue
Ma, Xinyu
Li, Yaliang
Ding, Bolin
Chowdhury, Mosharaf
author_facet He, Shiqi
Cui, Yue
Ma, Xinyu
Li, Yaliang
Ding, Bolin
Chowdhury, Mosharaf
contents Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19838
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory
He, Shiqi
Cui, Yue
Ma, Xinyu
Li, Yaliang
Ding, Bolin
Chowdhury, Mosharaf
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.
title Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19838