English

WEBSERV: A Full-Stack and RL-Ready Web Environment for Training Web Agents at Scale

Machine Learning 2026-05-19 v2 Computation and Language

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) for web agents demands environments that are both effective for evaluation and efficient enough for large-scale on-policy training. Current web environments fall short: server-side Docker setups are too resource-intensive for massive parallel rollouts, while browser-side interfaces produce noisy observations, execute actions unreliably under modern single-page applications, and omit visual interactivity cues. We introduce WebServ, a full-stack, RL-ready web environment that addresses these limitations end-to-end. On the server side, WebServ uses Incus containers with block-level copy-on-write, reducing launch latency by ~5x and persistent storage by ~240x, enabling 200+ concurrent isolated environments on a single host. On the browser side, WebServ provides a compact, site-agnostic observation and action interface derived automatically from the DOM with human-aligned interactivity cues, and a robust action execution backend using network-aware waiting for reliable SPA support. On WebArena-Lite, WebServ achieves state-of-the-art single-prompt results, with controlled comparisons confirming consistent gains across GPT-4o, OpenAI-o3, and Llama-3.1-8B over vanilla WebArena. We further train Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-30B-A3B with RL entirely within WebServ; the RL-trained 4B model achieves 55.5% mean accuracy, surpassing both Claude 4.5 Sonnet (50.0%) and the RL-trained 8B model from WebAgent-R1 (51.8%).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.16252,
  title  = {WEBSERV: A Full-Stack and RL-Ready Web Environment for Training Web Agents at Scale},
  author = {Yuxuan Lu and Ziyi Wang and Jing Huang and Hui Liu and Jiri Gesi and Yan Han and Shihan Fu and Tianqi Zheng and Xianfeng Tang and Chen Luo and Yisi Sang and Jin Lai and Dakuo Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.16252},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:44:27.764Z