Ryoma Obara

CL
h-index14
4papers
20citations
Novelty39%
AI Score42

4 Papers

CLMay 28
Revisiting Observation Reduction for Web Agents: Comprehensive Evaluation with a Lightweight Framework

Masafumi Enomoto, Ryoma Obara, Haochen Zhang et al.

HTML observations in LLM-based web agents are extremely long, and while many reduction methods have been proposed, it remains unclear which methods reduce overall agent latency while maintaining performance. The main obstacle is the high cost of end-to-end evaluation: in our experiments, evaluating 11 methods across 32 configurations on 33 tasks of WorkArena L1 required 232.4 cumulative hours. To address this, we propose a lightweight evaluation framework based on the Minimal Failure Set (MFS), the minimal set of HTML elements whose removal causes task failure. We define coverage as the fraction of instances in which a reduction method fully retains the MFS, which serves as a proxy metric that requires neither web access nor LLM inference. We validate that coverage strongly correlates with end-to-end success rate, with over 100$\times$ speedup in cumulative evaluation time on both benchmarks. Using this framework, we find that extractive HTML reduction methods require either high computation cost or domain-specific optimization to reduce agent latency while maintaining performance. Building on this, we optimize a pruning program on MFS training data, achieving 2.2$\times$ faster per-step latency on WorkArena L1 while retaining 84\% of the original success rate, and 3.1$\times$ faster on WebLinx while retaining 89\%.

CLApr 2
Read More, Think More: Revisiting Observation Reduction for Web Agents

Masafumi Enomoto, Ryoma Obara, Haochen Zhang et al.

Web agents based on large language models (LLMs) rely on observations of web pages -- commonly represented as HTML -- as the basis for identifying available actions and planning subsequent steps. Prior work has treated the verbosity of HTML as an obstacle to performance and adopted observation reduction as a standard practice. We revisit this trend and demonstrate that the optimal observation representation depends on model capability and thinking token budget: (1) compact observations (accessibility trees) are preferable for lower-capability models, while detailed observations (HTML) are advantageous for higher-capability models; moreover, increasing thinking tokens further amplifies the benefit of HTML. (2) Our error analysis suggests that higher-capability models exploit layout information in HTML for better action grounding, while lower-capability models suffer from increased hallucination under longer inputs. We also find that incorporating observation history improves performance across most models and settings, and a diff-based representation offers a token-efficient alternative. Based on these findings, we suggest practical guidelines: adaptively select observation representations based on model capability and thinking token budget, and incorporate observation history using diff-based representations.

AIMay 4
cotomi Act: Learning to Automate Work by Watching You

Masafumi Oyamada, Kunihiro Takeoka, Kosuke Akimoto et al.

What if a browser agent could learn your work simply by watching you do it? We present cotomi Act, a browser-based computer-using agent that combines reliable multi-step task execution with persistent organizational knowledge learned from user behavior. For execution, an agent scaffold with adaptive lazy observation, verbal-diff-based history compression, coarse-grained actions, and test-time scaling via best-of-N action selection achieves 80.4% on the 179-task WebArena human-evaluation subset, exceeding the reported 78.2% human baseline. For organizational knowledge, a behavior-to-knowledge pipeline passively observes the user's browsing and progressively abstracts it into artifacts (task boards, wiki) exposed through a shared workspace editable by both user and agent. A controlled proxy evaluation confirms that task success improves as behavior-derived knowledge accumulates. In our live demonstration, attendees interact with the system in a real browser, issuing tasks and observing end-to-end autonomous execution and shared knowledge management.

CLDec 29, 2024
Understanding the Impact of Confidence in Retrieval Augmented Generation: A Case Study in the Medical Domain

Shintaro Ozaki, Yuta Kato, Siyuan Feng et al.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) complements the knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging external information to enhance response accuracy for queries. This approach is widely applied in several fields by taking its advantage of injecting the most up-to-date information, and researchers are focusing on understanding and improving this aspect to unlock the full potential of RAG in such high-stakes applications. However, despite the potential of RAG to address these needs, the mechanisms behind the confidence levels of its outputs remain underexplored. Our study focuses on the impact of RAG, specifically examining whether RAG improves the confidence of LLM outputs in the medical domain. We conduct this analysis across various configurations and models. We evaluate confidence by treating the model's predicted probability as its output and calculating several evaluation metrics which include calibration error method, entropy, the best probability, and accuracy. Experimental results across multiple datasets confirmed that certain models possess the capability to judge for themselves whether an inserted document relates to the correct answer. These results suggest that evaluating models based on their output probabilities determine whether they function as generators in the RAG framework. Our approach allows us to evaluate whether the models handle retrieved documents.