Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web

Xiang Deng*, Yu Gu, Boyuan Zheng, Shijie Chen,
Samuel Stevens, Boshi Wang, Huan Sun*, Yu Su*
The Ohio State University
*Corresponding Authors.
arXiv Code Training Data Test Data (encrypted) Raw Dump
Mind2Web is a dataset for developing and evaluating generalist agents for the web that can follow language instructions to complete complex tasks on any website. Mind2Web contains 2,350 tasks from 137 websites spanning 31 domains that:
  • Reflect diverse and practical use cases on the web.
  • Provide challenging yet realistic environments with real-world websites.
  • Test generalization ability across tasks and environments.

(a) Find one-way flights from New York to Toronto.

(b) Book a roundtrip on July 1 from Mumbai to London and vice versa on July 5 for two adults and a 12-year-old in premium economy and if a flight is not available, search through the calendar for available flights.

(c) Search receipt with the eTicket 12345678 for the trip reserved by Jason Two

(d) Find a flight from Chicago to London on 20 April and return on 23 April.

(e) Search for the interactions between ibuprofen and aspirin.

(f) As a Verizon user, finance a blue iPhone 13 with 256gb along with monthly apple care.

(g) Find Elon Musk's profile and start following, start notifications and like the latest tweet.

(h) Browse comedy films streaming on Netflix that was released from 1992 to 2007.

(i) Open page to schedule an appointment for car knowledge test.

Abstract

We introduce **Mind2Web**, the first dataset for developing and evaluating generalist agents for the web that can follow language instructions to complete complex tasks on any website. Existing datasets for web agents either use simulated websites or only cover a limited set of websites and tasks, thus not suitable for generalist web agents. With over 2,000 open-ended tasks collected from 137 websites spanning 31 domains and crowdsourced action sequences for the tasks, **Mind2Web** provides three necessary ingredients for building generalist web agents: 1. diverse domains, websites, and tasks, 2. use of real-world websites instead of simulated and simplified ones, and 3. a broad spectrum of user interaction patterns. Based on **Mind2Web**, we conduct an initial exploration of using large language models (LLMs) for building generalist web agents. While the raw HTML of real-world websites are often too large to be fed to LLMs, we show that first filtering it with a small LM significantly improves the effectiveness and efficiency of LLMs. Our solution demonstrates a decent level of performance, even on websites or entire domains the model has never seen before, but there is still a substantial room to improve towards truly generalizable agents.

*Updates* - 2025-3-25: [Online-Mind2Web](https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/Online-Mind2Web) released! - 2024-3-18: [Multimodal-Mind2Web](https://huggingface.co/datasets/osunlp/Multimodal-Mind2Web) dataset released. We have paired each HTML document with the corresponding webpage screenshot image and saved the trouble of downloading [Mind2Web Raw Dump](https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/Mind2Web?tab=readme-ov-file#raw-dump-with-full-traces-and-snapshots). - 2023-8-6: We have updated the [GitHub Repo](https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/Mind2Web) with fine-tuning code/models for MindAct. - 2023-7-3: We have released the raw dump with the trace file, network traffic, screenshots and other files. Please check out the [data](https://app.globus.org/file-manager?origin_id=32e6b738-a0b0-47f8-b475-26bf1c5ebf19) and the [GitHub Repo](https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/Mind2Web) for more details. - 2023-6-13: We have released the training/test data and codebase for the paper. Please check out our [GitHub Repo](https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/Mind2Web).

Introduction

Mind2Web contains 2,350 tasks spanning 137 websites. We collect the websites using the ranking from SimilarWeb as reference. We balance the task and website distribution to better test different levels of generalization abilities:
  • Cross Task Generalization: Generalization across tasks in the same environment, such as (a) to (c).
  • Cross Website Generalization: Generalization across websites under the same domain, such as (a) to (d).
  • Cross Domain Generalization: Generalization across tasks and environments, such as (e) through (i).

For each task, we provide the following information:
  • Task Description that describes the task in natural language sentences.
  • Action Sequence that describes the sequence of actions to be performed to complete the task.
    • Each action is a pair of (Operation, Target Element), where the Target Element is an element in the web page that the user choose to interact with, and the Operation is the action to be performed on the element.
    • We support four common operations: Click, Hover, Type and Select
  • Webpage Snapshots that serve as the environment. We provide snapshots of differnt formats:
    • MHTML that contains the raw HTML code of the webpage.
    • DOM Snapshot that contains snapshot with DOM, layout, and style information
    • Image that contains the screenshot of the webpage.
    • HAR that contains all network traffic for replay.
    • Trace that contains the complete interaction trace for the annotation.

The data is collected through the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform. The collection is done in three phases:
  • Phase 1, Task Proposal: We first ask the worker to propose tasks that can be performed on a given website. We mannually review the proposed tasks and select the ones that are feasible and interesting for annotation in Phase 2.
  • Phase 2, Task Demonstration: We ask the worker to demonstrate how to perform the task on the website. We develop an annotation tool with Playwright which records the interaction trace and takes snapshots of the webpage at each step.
  • Phase 3, Task Verification: The authors verified all the tasks to make sure that all actions are clean and the task description correctly relfects the annotated actions.
* The video here combines Phase 1 and Phase 2 for demonstration purpose.


Data Statistics & Comparison

Below we show some statics of **Mind2Web**, and how it compares against other existing datasets.
  Mind2Web
 
# Domains 5 / 31
# Environments
 		 137 websites
Environment
Type		 Real world websites
Avg. # Elements 1,135
# Tasks
 		 2,350
Task Type Daily task
High level goal
Avg. # Actions 7.3
Web Task
MiniWoB++ WebShop RUSS
- 1 -
100 websites/webpages 1 website
8 webpages		 22 websites
Simplified ATARI-like website Simplified shopping website Real world websites
27.5 38.0 801.4
100 12,000 instantiation with different products 80
Game like task
Low level instruction 		Product searching
High level goal 		Help task
High + Low level
3.6 11.3 5.4
Web Extraction & QA
SWDE WebSRC
8 11
80
websites/webpages		 70 websites
Real world websites Snippets of real world websites
898.0 119.3
32
attributes		 460
unique questions
Information extraction
High level goal		 -
High level goal
1 1
Mobile App Task
PixelHelp META-GUI MoTIF
4 6 15
4 Apps
 		 11 Apps 125 Apps
Mobile Apps
 		 Mobile Apps Mobile Apps
- 79.4 188.4
187 1,125 dialogues
4,648 turns 		4,707 demonstrations
756 unique tasks
Help task
High + Low level 		Daily task
High level goal 		Daily task
High + Low level
- 4.3 4.4
Dialogue
SGD MultiWOZ
20 7
45 services
 		 -
-
 		 -
- -
86 Intents / 314 slots
16,142 dialogues		 13 Intents / 24 slots
8,438 dialogues
Daily task
High level goal 		Daily task
High level goal
- -

Data Overview

Below we show an overview of the domains, websites and tasks covered by our dataset. You can interact with the visualization to explore the data. - Figure (a) shows the distribution of **domains** and **websites** in our dataset, you can click to zoom in. - Figure (b) shows the distribution of task **tags**1 for the selected domain and website. You can click to select a tag, or click outside to deselect. - Figure (c) shows sample tasks included in our dataset. The tasks are organized by **Intents**, **Objects** and **Conditions**1 contained in the task. Select in Figure (a) and (b) to filter the tasks.

(a) Domain & Websites

(b) Tags1

Selected Domain & Website: All Selected tag: All

(c) Tasks organized by Intents, Objects and Conditions1, 2

1. *We use ChatGPT & GPT-4 to extract intents, objects and conditions from the tasks, and assign tags. See the [Prompt](static/data/task_parsing_prompt.json) for more details.* 2. *We only show the 10 most common items at each level here.*

Data Explorer

Below we show the data explorer, which allows you to explore the training data in more detail. You can click `Random Task` to load a random task. Or select a `Domain`, `Website`, and type to search for a task.
Select a task to view the recording
Domain & Website
Task


Related Work

Our work is inspired by many existing works, including: - `MiniWoB`, `MiniWoB++`, `RUSS` and `WebShop` that focus on task automation in web environments.
  • Tianlin Shi, Andrej Karpathy, Linxi Fan, Jonathan Hernandez, and Percy Liang. World of Bits: An Open-Domain Platform for Web-Based Agents. ICML 2017.
  • Evan Zheran Liu*, Kelvin Guu*, Panupong Pasupat*, Tianlin Shi, Percy Liang. Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces using Workflow-Guided Exploration. ICLR 2018.
  • Nancy Xu, Sam Masling, Michael Du, Giovanni Campagna, Larry Heck, James Landay, and Monica S. Lam. Grounding open-domain instructions to automate web support tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.16057 (2021).
  • Shunyu Yao, Howard Chen, John Yang, and Karthik Narasimhan. WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents. NeurIPS 2022.
- `SWDE` and `WebSRC` that focuses on web extraction and QA.
  • Qiang Hao, Rui Cai, Yanwei Pang, and Lei Zhang. From One Tree to a Forest: a Unified Solution for Structured Web Data Extraction. SIGIR 2011.
  • Xingyu Chen, Zihan Zhao, Lu Chen, JiaBao Ji, Danyang Zhang, Ao Luo, Yuxuan Xiong, and Kai Yu. 2021. WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension. EMNLP 2021.
- `PixelHelp`, `META-GUI` and `MoTIF` that focuses on task automation with mobile APPS.
  • Yang Li, Jiacong He, Xin Zhou, Yuan Zhang, and Jason Baldridge. Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences. ACL 2020.
  • Liangtai Sun, Xingyu Chen, Lu Chen, Tianle Dai, Zichen Zhu, and Kai Yu. META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI. EMNLP 2022.
  • Andrea Burns, Deniz Arsan, Sanjna Agrawal, Ranjitha Kumar, Kate Saenko, and Bryan A. Plummer. A Dataset for Interactive Vision-Language Navigation with Unknown Command Feasibility. ECCV 2022.
Concurrent to our project, there are also many efforts on developing web-based agents, in particular with large language models. We hope **Mind2Web** can serve as a standard benchmark and facilitate the development of such systems. - ChatGPT and plugins. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins. - ACT-1 from ADEPT. https://www.adept.ai/blog/act-1. - LangChain. https://python.langchain.com/en/latest/index.html. - NatBOT. https://github.com/nat/natbot. - Multion. https://www.multion.ai/. - Auto-GPT. https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT

Disclaimer

This dataset was collected and released solely for research purposes, with the goal of making the web more accessible via language technologies. The authors are strongly against any potential harmful use of the data or technology to any party.

Citation

@misc{deng2023mind2web,
  title={Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web},
  author={Xiang Deng and Yu Gu and Boyuan Zheng and Shijie Chen and Samuel Stevens and Boshi Wang and Huan Sun and Yu Su},
  year={2023},
  eprint={2306.06070},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Corresponding Authors

Xiang Deng
Huan Sun
Yu Su