Routing Is Least Learnable Where It Is Most Valuable: Bounds on Representation Routing for Web Agents

Tool and agent routing from natural-language prompts is naturally a set-valued prediction problem: a single query may require multiple agents, while over-selection increases execution cost. The benchmark introduced here is derived from WildChat and contains 3,000 prompts over a fixed 12-agent catalog, with AI-assisted heuristic labels under a fixed schema and controlled rebalancing for multi-label evaluation. The evaluation protocol combines set-level metrics (Precision, Recall, F1, Jaccard, and Exact Match), latency, an execution-oriented capability-coverage simulation, and a constrained weighted-routing setting based on ordinal agent-cost tiers. Compared methods include nearest-neighbor matching, linear multilabel classification, dependency-aware baselines, a fine-tuned encoder, deterministic weighted post-scoring via Weighted Agent Routing (WAR), and a zero-shot LLM baseline. Results show that supervised routers substantially outperform nearest-neighbor and zero-shot LLM routing. The fine-tuned encoder achieves the strongest unconstrained set accuracy, while the linear multilabel model provides the strongest practical baseline. In the constrained setting, the weighted routing layer improves utility when applied on top of strong supervised scorers, with the largest gain observed for Encoder+WAR. Overall, the benchmark and evaluation protocol support reproducible study of accuracy-cost trade-offs in fixed-catalog multi-agent routing.

Existing web agent benchmarks have largely converged on short, single-site tasks that frontier models are approaching saturation on. However, real world web use consists of long-horizon, multi-site workflows. Common web navigation tasks, such as comparing products across different domains, planning trips across multiple services, or summarizing information from multiple search queries, require sustained context and cross-site reasoning over potentially hours of browsing. To capture and evaluate such behaviors, we introduce Odysseys: a benchmark of 200 long-horizon web tasks derived from real world browsing sessions evaluated on the live Internet. We find that binary pass/fail evaluation is inadequate for long-horizon settings and introduce a rubric-based evaluation, annotating each Odysseys task with an average of 6.1 graded rubrics. We demonstrate that this yields higher agreement with humans and provides a more fine-grained signal than commonly used trajectory-level LLM-as-a-judge evaluation metrics. We tested several leading frontier models and find that the strongest models achieve a success rate of 44.5%, which leaves substantial room for future improvements. Beyond task success, we argue that efficiency is a first-class concern for long-horizon agents. We introduce a Trajectory Efficiency metric (rubric score per step) and find that even frontier agents achieve only 1.15%, marking an evident need for agents that can succeed efficiently and not simply eventually. Odysseys isolates the critical evaluation of long-horizon proficiency in open-web environments, providing a realistic benchmark to measure progress towards computer-use agents that can potentially productively operate for hours. We release our tasks, evaluation scripts, and other results at https://odysseys-website.pages.dev

Reliable web-agent monitoring is difficult when model-internal uncertainty signals such as token logits are unavailable. In this work, we study prefix-level risk prediction for web agents using observable trajectory signals: given an evolving prefix, estimate whether the current execution remains on track or is tending toward failure. We derive two observable trajectory representations: Macro features summarize cross-step agent--environment behavior and feedback, while Micro features measure the consistency of intention, action, and anticipated state change through repeated black-box queries. Instead of inheriting the final result label, we label the first critical error that remains uncorrected in the observed continuation and is associated with final failure as a key-step boundary, preserving valid early prefixes of failed trajectories as on track. Across WebArena-Lite and Online Mind2Web web agent benchmarks with five open- and closed-source backbones, observable trajectory signals are competitive with internal-signal baselines. The resulting predictors also support early intervention under fixed false-cut budgets and transfer across held-out website categories. These findings show that observable trajectory signals support valuable risk prediction abilities.