GTA: Generating Long-Horizon Tasks for Web Agents at Scale
Authors: Tenghao Huang, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Yilun Zhou, Muhao Chen, Jonathan May, Chien-Sheng Wu
Organizations: University of Southern California · Salesforce AI Research · University of California, Davis
Abstract
Web agents, which couple language models with browsing and tool-use capabilities, show promise as open web assistants. Yet progress is increasingly limited by the lack of scalable, process-level supervision. Existing benchmarks are largely manually constructed, providing only coarse start-goal annotations without intermediate trajectories, while recent automatic generation efforts remain expensive, biased, and shallow. These limitations prevent reliable training and evaluation of agents that must generalize to realistic, multi-hop, cross-page tasks. We introduce a scalable framework, GTA, that integrates crawling, retrieval-based seeding, in-context generation, and automated quality control to produce realistic tasks paired with executable trajectories. This design decouples crawling from generation for greater efficiency, grounds tasks in the site graph to enforce compositionality, and ensures dense supervision through deterministic replays and systematic validation. We instantiate the pipeline on over 50 websites covering e-commerce, government, forums, and news, with multilingual and multi-hop coverage. The resulting benchmark reveals a significant human-agent performance gap and enables detailed diagnostics. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) formalizing multi-hop web-agent task generation, (ii) proposing an efficient and validated pipeline for automatic data creation, and (iii) releasing a dynamic benchmark with reproducible evaluation.
As web agents close the gap with humans on benchmarks, one question arises: Do today's agents perform just as well on tomorrow's web? We introduce TimeWarp, a benchmark that emulates the evolving web. TimeWarp consists of three web environments, each with six UI versions spanning UI design, frontend code, and workflows from different eras of the internet. We pair TimeWarp with a set of complex, realistic tasks covering different forms of web navigation. Our experiments reveal that vision-based agents are vulnerable to changes, while text-based agents become brittle once fine-tuned on a single version. To address this, we propose TimeTraj, a new annotation method that uses plan distillation to collect trajectories across multiple versions. By training agents on teacher rollouts using our BC-variant, we achieve substantial performance gains: 20.4% to 37.7% for Qwen-3 4B and 0% to 27.0% for Llama-3.1 8B models. Our work helps study generalization across web designs and opens a new paradigm for collecting plans rather than trajectories to improve the robustness of web agents.
GUI agents that interact with graphical interfaces on behalf of users represent a promising direction for practical AI assistants. However, training such agents is hindered by the scarcity of suitable environments. We present InfiniteWeb, a system that automatically generates functional web environments at scale for GUI agent training. While LLMs perform well on generating a single webpage, building a realistic and functional website with many interconnected pages faces challenges. We address these challenges through unified specification, task-centric test-driven development, and a combination of website seed with reference design image to ensure diversity. Our system also generates verifiable task evaluators enabling dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that InfiniteWeb surpasses commercial coding agents at realistic website construction, and GUI agents trained on our generated environments achieve significant performance improvements on OSWorld and Online-Mind2Web, demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed system.
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized web agents that can automate complex tasks on websites. However, their accuracy remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality web trajectory training data. Existing automatic trajectory generation methods suffer from incomplete website coverage due to homepage-based task proposals or random-walk exploration. Such methods often result in hallucinated or ambiguous task synthesis that lead to incomplete and unreliable trajectory generation. Here, we present AutoSurfer, a comprehensive web trajectory generator that addresses these limitations through three key innovations. First, AutoSurfer employs a systematic breadth-first exploration strategy that maintains a queue of discovered pages and action traces, propagates knowledge across pages to avoid redundant exploration, and recursively expands multi-level graphical user interface elements - closely resembling how a human would learn a new website. Second, AutoSurfer leverages the exploration trajectory to guide task synthesis, reducing hallucinations by grounding complex tasks in actual navigation paths rather than isolated actions or page content alone. Third, AutoSurfer uses the same exploration trajectory as hints to steer a web agent toward more accurate and reliable trajectory refinement. Together, these innovations enable AutoSurfer to comprehensively cover a website's action space and generate data suitable for training website-specific LLMs. We evaluate AutoSurfer on the WebArena benchmark by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods - Explorer, OS-Genesis, and SynthAgent - achieving up to 24.23% overall task completion accuracy compared to 19.59% for the best prior method. Further, task diversity analysis demonstrates that AutoSurfer yields a more diverse distribution of synthesized tasks.