cs.AIFeb 16, 2026

EmbeWebAgent: Embedding Web Agents into Any Customized UI

Authors: Chenyang Ma, Clyde Fare, Matthew Wilson, Dave Braines

Organizations: IBM Research Europe, UK · University of Oxford

Abstract

Most web agents operate at the human interface level, observing screenshots or raw DOM trees without application-level access, which limits robustness and action expressiveness. In enterprise settings, however, explicit control of both the frontend and backend is available. We present EmbeWebAgent, a framework for embedding agents directly into existing UIs using lightweight frontend hooks (curated ARIA and URL-based observations, and a per-page function registry exposed via a WebSocket) and a reusable backend workflow that performs reasoning and takes actions. EmbeWebAgent is stack-agnostic (e.g., React or Angular), supports mixed-granularity actions ranging from GUI primitives to higher-level composites, and orchestrates navigation, manipulation, and domain-specific analytics via MCP tools. Our demo shows minimal retrofitting effort and robust multi-step behaviors grounded in a live UI setting. Live Demo: https://youtu.be/Cy06Ljee1JQ

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Feb 19, 2026

Web Agents Should Use Typed Actions Instead of Click-Based Browsing

This position paper argues that building a reliable agentic Web requires shifting from low-level interaction primitives to typed actions supported by a semantic layer. Today's web agents primarily operate through clicks, keystrokes, and DOM manipulation, which leads to brittle long-horizon behavior, high execution cost, and limited auditability. We propose web verbs as a concrete design for this layer. A verb exposes a web operation as a typed function with structured inputs, structured outputs, and documented behavior, whether it is backed by a server-side Web API or a maintained client-side workflow. Verb calls can carry preconditions, postconditions, policy tags, and logging hooks, allowing agents to synthesize concise programs with explicit control flow and data flow and to produce checkable execution traces. Using representative case studies, we illustrate how verb-level composition can produce correct, reproducible outcomes, while browser agents using low-level interaction primitives may produce brittle behavior or incorrect reasoning. We conclude with a call to action on standardization, developer tooling, and community processes needed to make this semantic layer deployable and trustworthy at web scale.
Oct 26, 2026

Back to Basics: A Skill-Centric Approach to Generalist Web Agents

Browser agents do not just need more practice. They need to practice the right things. We introduce MiniWeb, a realistic miniature of the web comprising 65 interconnected websites across 15 domains, where agents navigate, search, and transact as people do. Its 369 human-annotated tasks cover everyday workflows and label 37 reusable interaction primitives grouped into 7 skill families, allowing us to diagnose which skills fail rather than only whether a task succeeds. Benchmarking ten open-weight agents, we find that drag & gesture is consistently the weakest family, with no agent solving more than 24% of its instances. To address this gap, we introduce MiniWebGen, a framework that autonomously generates verified, skill-centric training data from MiniWeb. Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-4B on just 3.1K verified trajectories improves single-primitive success by 24.9pp across 13 unseen websites, with gains across every skill family. However, these trajectories teach short-horizon interactions, which do not directly translate to full-task success. We build on this result with MiniWebAgent, which pairs the trained executor with a planner that decomposes full tasks into the skill-level steps it learned to perform. This approach improves task success by 19.4pp points on unseen MiniWeb sites and transfers to external benchmarks, with gains of 9.3pp on WebArena-Lite, 16.1pp on Online-Mind2Web, and 20.0pp on WebVoyager, without training on their trajectories. We provide a simple recipe for compact browser agents: practice reusable skills directly, then compose them to solve unfamiliar tasks.
Apr 9, 2026

MolmoWeb: Open Visual Web Agent and Open Data for the Open Web

Web agents--autonomous systems that navigate and execute tasks on the web on behalf of users--have the potential to transform how people interact with the digital world. However, the most capable web agents today rely on proprietary models with undisclosed training data and recipes, limiting scientific understanding, reproducibility, and community-driven progress. We believe agents for the open web should be built in the open. To this end, we introduce (1) MolmoWebMix, a large and diverse mixture of browser task demonstrations and web-GUI perception data and (2) MolmoWeb, a family of fully open multimodal web agents. Specifically, MolmoWebMix combines over 100K synthetic task trajectories from multiple complementary generation pipelines with 30K+ human demonstrations, atomic web-skill trajectories, and GUI perception data, including referring expression grounding and screenshot question answering. MolmoWeb agents operate as instruction-conditioned visual-language action policies: given a task instruction and a webpage screenshot, they predict the next browser action, requiring no access to HTML, accessibility trees, or specialized APIs. Available in 4B and 8B size, on browser-use benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and DeepShop, MolmoWeb agents achieve state-of-the-art results outperforming similar scale open-weight-only models such as Fara-7B, UI-Tars-1.5-7B, and Holo1-7B. MolmoWeb-8B also surpasses set-of-marks (SoM) agents built on much larger closed frontier models like GPT-4o. We further demonstrate consistent gains through test-time scaling via parallel rollouts with best-of-N selection, achieving 94.7% and 60.5% pass@4 (compared to 78.2% and 35.3% pass@1) on WebVoyager and Online-Mind2Web respectively. We will release model checkpoints, training data, code, and a unified evaluation harness to enable reproducibility and accelerate open research on web agents.