English

Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation

Computation and Language 2023-10-31 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) struggle on processing complicated observations in interactive decision making tasks. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple hierarchical prompting approach. Diverging from previous prompting approaches that always put the full observation (e.g. a web page) to the prompt, we propose to first construct an action-aware observation which is more condensed and relevant with a dedicated SUMMARIZER prompt. The ACTOR prompt then predicts the next action based on the summarized observation. While our method has broad applicability, we particularly demonstrate its efficacy in the complex domain of web navigation where a full observation often contains redundant and irrelevant information. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art prompting mechanics by 6.2% on task success rate, demonstrating its potential on interactive decision making tasks with long observation traces.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.14257,
  title  = {Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation},
  author = {Abishek Sridhar and Robert Lo and Frank F. Xu and Hao Zhu and Shuyan Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.14257},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

EMNLP 2023 Findings; Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations Workshop at ACL 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:43:17.777Z