WebTestPilot: Agentic End-to-End Web Testing against Natural Language Specification by Inferring Oracles with Symbolized GUI Elements

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Teoh, Xiwen, Lin, Yun, Nguyen, Duc-Minh, Ren, Ruofei, Zhang, Wenjie, Dong, Jin Song
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Teoh, Xiwen
Lin, Yun
Nguyen, Duc-Minh
Ren, Ruofei
Zhang, Wenjie
Dong, Jin Song
author_facet Teoh, Xiwen
Lin, Yun
Nguyen, Duc-Minh
Ren, Ruofei
Zhang, Wenjie
Dong, Jin Song
contents Visual language model (VLM) agents show great promise in automating end-to-end (E2E) web testing against requirements in natural language. However, the probabilistic nature of language models can have inherent hallucinations. Therefore, given a detected inconsistency between the requirement and the web application, it is hard to distinguish whether it stems from the hallucination or a real application bug. Addressing this issue presents two core technical challenges: the implicit oracle inference challenge, where the agent must act as its own oracle to implicitly decide if the application's behavior is correct without guidance, and the probabilistic inference challenge, where an LLM's inconsistent reasoning undermines its trustworthiness as an oracle. Existing LLM-based approaches fail to capture such implicit oracles, either by treating any page navigation that doesn't crash as a success, or by checking each state in isolation, thus missing bugs dependent on context from prior steps. We introduce WebTestPilot, an LLM-based agent designed to address these challenges. WebTestPilot uses (1) a symbolization layer which detects and symbolizes critical GUI elements on the web application into symbols (i.e., variables) and (2) translates natural language specification into a sequence of steps, each of which is equipped with inferred pre- and post-conditions over the symbols as an oracle. This oracle captures data, temporal, and causal dependencies, enabling the validation of implicit requirements. To advance research in this area, we build a benchmark of bug-injected web apps for evaluating NL-to-E2E testing. The results show that WebTestPilot achieves a task completion rate of 99%, with 96% precision and 96% recall in bug detection, outperforming the best baseline (+70 precision, +27 recall). The agent generalizes across diverse natural language inputs and model scales.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_11724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WebTestPilot: Agentic End-to-End Web Testing against Natural Language Specification by Inferring Oracles with Symbolized GUI Elements
Teoh, Xiwen
Lin, Yun
Nguyen, Duc-Minh
Ren, Ruofei
Zhang, Wenjie
Dong, Jin Song
Software Engineering
Visual language model (VLM) agents show great promise in automating end-to-end (E2E) web testing against requirements in natural language. However, the probabilistic nature of language models can have inherent hallucinations. Therefore, given a detected inconsistency between the requirement and the web application, it is hard to distinguish whether it stems from the hallucination or a real application bug. Addressing this issue presents two core technical challenges: the implicit oracle inference challenge, where the agent must act as its own oracle to implicitly decide if the application's behavior is correct without guidance, and the probabilistic inference challenge, where an LLM's inconsistent reasoning undermines its trustworthiness as an oracle. Existing LLM-based approaches fail to capture such implicit oracles, either by treating any page navigation that doesn't crash as a success, or by checking each state in isolation, thus missing bugs dependent on context from prior steps. We introduce WebTestPilot, an LLM-based agent designed to address these challenges. WebTestPilot uses (1) a symbolization layer which detects and symbolizes critical GUI elements on the web application into symbols (i.e., variables) and (2) translates natural language specification into a sequence of steps, each of which is equipped with inferred pre- and post-conditions over the symbols as an oracle. This oracle captures data, temporal, and causal dependencies, enabling the validation of implicit requirements. To advance research in this area, we build a benchmark of bug-injected web apps for evaluating NL-to-E2E testing. The results show that WebTestPilot achieves a task completion rate of 99%, with 96% precision and 96% recall in bug detection, outperforming the best baseline (+70 precision, +27 recall). The agent generalizes across diverse natural language inputs and model scales.
title WebTestPilot: Agentic End-to-End Web Testing against Natural Language Specification by Inferring Oracles with Symbolized GUI Elements
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11724