← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2605.29927 · v2
Does The Way You Plan Matter? An Empirical Study of Planning Representations for LLM Web Agents
首次提交 2026-05-28 21:39
版本更新 2026-10-27 18:44
雷达观测 2026-10-29 00:35
摘要
Despite recent advances, LLM-based web agents still struggle with limited exploration, omission of critical steps, and sensitivity to task constraints. Prior work suggests that many of these failures stem from weaknesses in planning, yet the impact of alternative natural language plan representations remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce PlanAhead, a static planner-executor framework that evaluates the impact of plan representation on agent performance. We first automatically categorize WebArena tasks into 3 difficulty levels, enabling consistent difficulty grading without human annotation. Then we systematically evaluate 4 different plan representations on the tasks categorized as hard: sequential subgoals, narrative, pseudocode, and checklist; across different families of multimodal LLM-powered agents(OpenAI, Alibaba, and Google). To account for stochastic variability, we introduce a novel decomposition of agent Success Rate (SR) into 2 interpretable evaluation metrics: Achievement Rate (AR) and Solved-Task Consistency (STC). Our results show that both, the plan formulation and the underlying LLM generating the plan, significantly influence web-agent robustness and task success.
作者备注：Camera Ready version for REALM at EMNLP. Extended appendix, extended discussion section and change of main figures
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v2 · 2026-10-27 18:44 · 最新观测版本
Does The Way You Plan Matter? An Empirical Study of Planning Representations for LLM Web Agents
Despite recent advances, LLM-based web agents still struggle with limited exploration, omission of critical steps, and sensitivity to task constraints. Prior work suggests that many of these failures stem from weaknesses in planning, yet the impact of alternative natural language plan representations remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce PlanAhead, a static planner-executor framework that evaluates the impact of plan representation on agent performance. We first automatically categorize WebArena tasks into 3 difficulty levels, enabling consistent difficulty grading without human annotation. Then we systematically evaluate 4 different plan representations on the tasks categorized as hard: sequential subgoals, narrative, pseudocode, and checklist; across different families of multimodal LLM-powered agents(OpenAI, Alibaba, and Google). To account for stochastic variability, we introduce a novel decomposition of agent Success Rate (SR) into 2 interpretable evaluation metrics: Achievement Rate (AR) and Solved-Task Consistency (STC). Our results show that both, the plan formulation and the underlying LLM generating the plan, significantly influence web-agent robustness and task success.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗