Paper Detail

MAG: A Web-Agent Benchmark and Harness for Multimodal Action and Guide Generation

Chengguang Gan, Hanjun Wei, Yunhao Liang, Zhixi Cai, Qinghao Zhang, Shiwen Ni

arxiv Score 16.2

Published 2026-07-11 · First seen 2026-07-14

Research Track B · General AI

Abstract

Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are embedded overlays widely used on web systems to guide users through operations inside a page, helping them get started with unfamiliar interfaces quickly. Completing a real task, however, rarely means clicking a few buttons on a single page: it takes a sequence of actions that unfolds across changing page states. Prior studies have also treated automated web agent actions and guide text generation as two separate problems, and most of them feed models textual page representations such as the DOM or accessibility trees rather than the rendered screens that humans actually operate on. In this work we introduce MAG, the first benchmark that unifies task execution and guide writing into a single Multimodal Action and Guide task, with two grounding schemes over screenshots: Set-of-Mark element selection and raw pixel coordinates. We further build a complete harness for this compound task, covering annotation with LLM assistance and human verification, training, evaluation in live environments, and joint metrics for actions and guides. With this harness we evaluate frontier API models and open multimodal models, and report detailed analyses. Finally, we design a GRPO training method augmented with expert trajectories, which nearly doubles the success rate of a supervised 9B agent (from 6.9% to 13.2%) and improves guide quality at the same time. Even the strongest model completes fewer than 40% of the tasks, leaving ample room for future research.

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BibTeX

@article{gan2026mag,
  title = {MAG: A Web-Agent Benchmark and Harness for Multimodal Action and Guide Generation},
  author = {Chengguang Gan and Hanjun Wei and Yunhao Liang and Zhixi Cai and Qinghao Zhang and Shiwen Ni},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are embedded overlays widely used on web systems to guide users through operations inside a page, helping them get started with unfamiliar interfaces quickly. Completing a real task, however, rarely means clicking a few buttons on a single page: it takes a sequence of actions that unfolds across changing page states. Prior studies have also treated automated web agent actions and guide text generation as two separate problems, and most of them feed models textua},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10079},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.CL},
  eprint = {2607.10079},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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