---
language:
- en
license: apache-2.0
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-generation
tags:
- web-agent
- process-reward-model
- preference
- reward-model
- web-navigation
- reasoning
- grpo
base_model: Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
datasets:
- ZYao720/WebArbiter-Data
model-index:
- name: WebArbiter-7B
  results:
  - task:
      type: text-generation
      name: Web Process Reward Modeling
    dataset:
      name: WebPRMBench
      type: ZYao720/WEBPRMBENCH
    metrics:
    - name: Avg Pairwise Accuracy
      type: accuracy
      value: 89.19
    - name: Avg BoN Accuracy
      type: accuracy
      value: 74.60
---

<div align="center">

# WebArbiter-7B

**A principle-guided reasoning Process Reward Model for web agents**

**Published at ICLR 2026**

[Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21872) | [Code](https://github.com/YaoZhang720/WebArbiter) | [Website](https://yaozhang.ai/WebArbiter/) | [Collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/ZYao720/ZYao720-69cd5263871b22e11d90f80f) | [Demo](https://yaozhang.ai/WebArbiter/demo.html)

</div>

## Introduction

**WebArbiter-7B** is a 7B reasoning Process Reward Model (PRM) for web agents, built on [Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct). Unlike scalar or checklist-based reward models, WebArbiter formulates step-level reward modeling as structured text generation — producing interpretable, principle-inducing justifications that conclude with a preference verdict identifying the action most conducive to task completion.

On [WEBPRMBENCH](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZYao720/WEBPRMBENCH), WebArbiter-7B achieves an **Avg. BoN Acc of 74.60%**, outperforming GPT-5 by **9.1 points** and the previous SOTA WebPRM (WebShepherd-8B) by **31 points**. In reward-guided trajectory search on WebArena-Lite, it surpasses WebShepherd-8B by up to **6.4 points** in success rate.

## Highlights

- **Reasoning as reward**: Generates structured `<State>`, `<Criteria>`, `<Analysis>`, and `<Answer>` outputs with auditable reasoning chains, instead of scalar scores or brittle checklists.
- **Principle-inducing evaluation**: Dynamically derives evaluation principles from user intent and page state, enabling robust assessment that generalizes across environments.
- **Two-stage training**: Reasoning distillation from o3 (SFT) followed by RL with Verifiable Rewards (GRPO) to correct teacher biases and align verdicts with ground-truth correctness.
- **Robust generalization**: SOTA performance across all four WebPRMBench environments, including out-of-domain enterprise workflows (WorkArena) and open-world websites (AssistantBench).

## Results on WebPRMBench

Models marked with ⋆ are ours. **Bold** = best overall.

| Model | Mind2Web | | WebArena | | AssistantBench | | WorkArena | | Avg. | |
|-------|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:|
| | Pair | BoN | Pair | BoN | Pair | BoN | Pair | BoN | Pair | BoN |
| *Proprietary LLM-as-judge* | | | | | | | | | | |
| GPT-4o-mini | 81.74 | 50.92 | 78.23 | 56.72 | 89.17 | 73.33 | 81.43 | 46.70 | 82.64 | 56.92 |
| GPT-4o | 79.99 | 52.62 | 84.58 | 66.67 | 85.83 | 66.67 | 84.33 | 55.19 | 83.68 | 60.29 |
| GPT-5 | 80.86 | 62.39 | 84.83 | 71.64 | 81.67 | 63.33 | 81.14 | 64.62 | 82.13 | 65.50 |
| Claude-3.7-Sonnet | 80.20 | 57.90 | 82.80 | 64.10 | 81.50 | 61.30 | 82.10 | 60.60 | 81.65 | 60.98 |
| Gemini-2.5-Flash | 81.30 | 57.01 | 82.71 | 62.19 | 80.00 | 63.33 | 83.30 | 56.13 | 81.83 | 59.67 |
| DeepSeek-R1 | 81.62 | 57.37 | 82.04 | 60.21 | 78.49 | 56.18 | 84.12 | 63.89 | 81.57 | 59.41 |
| *Open-source LLM-as-judge* | | | | | | | | | | |
| Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | 77.79 | 39.18 | 74.88 | 42.79 | 84.17 | 53.33 | 77.58 | 35.85 | 77.61 | 42.78 |
| Llama-3-70B-Instruct | 80.55 | 49.36 | 77.36 | 50.75 | 85.83 | 70.00 | 79.08 | 40.09 | 80.71 | 52.55 |
| *WebPRMs* | | | | | | | | | | |
| WebShepherd-8B | 86.66 | 73.69 | 68.33 | 43.88 | 55.92 | 30.00 | 54.56 | 25.53 | 64.34 | 43.28 |
| ⋆ **WebArbiter-7B** | **97.07** | **89.53** | **88.43** | **68.66** | **89.17** | **70.00** | **82.09** | **70.19** | **89.19** | **74.60** |

## Reward-Guided Trajectory Search (WebArena-Lite)

WebArbiter also excels as a practical reward signal for trajectory search. Using Best-of-5 sampling with a Knockout Tournament mechanism on [WebArena-Lite](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06327):

| Policy | WebPRM | Shopping | CMS | Reddit | GitLab | MAP | Avg. | Δ |
|--------|--------|:--------:|:---:|:------:|:------:|:---:|:----:|:-:|
| GPT-4o-mini | w/o Search | 21.74 | 22.86 | 19.05 | 34.38 | 19.35 | 23.48 | — |
| GPT-4o-mini | GPT-4o-mini (as WebPRM) | 24.44 | 22.86 | 26.32 | 33.33 | 15.38 | 24.47 | +0.99 |
| GPT-4o-mini | WebShepherd-8B | 26.09 | 45.71 | 23.81 | 40.62 | 35.48 | 34.34 | +10.86 |
| GPT-4o-mini | **WebArbiter-7B** | **37.78** | 42.86 | **36.84** | **46.67** | **38.46** | **40.52** | **+17.04** |
| GPT-4o | w/o Search | 23.91 | 31.43 | 28.57 | 56.25 | 19.35 | 31.90 | — |
| GPT-4o | GPT-4o-mini (as WebPRM) | 26.67 | 37.14 | 42.11 | 40.00 | 19.23 | 33.03 | +1.13 |
| GPT-4o | WebShepherd-8B | 30.43 | 42.86 | 47.62 | 46.88 | 35.48 | 40.65 | +8.75 |
| GPT-4o | **WebArbiter-7B** | **44.44** | 42.86 | **52.63** | **56.67** | **38.46** | **47.01** | **+15.11** |

## Quick Start

```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "ZYao720/WebArbiter-7B"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="auto",
    trust_remote_code=True,
)

# Construct your prompt following the WebPRMBench format.
# See https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZYao720/WEBPRMBENCH for examples.
user_prompt = "..."  # evaluation prompt with intent, AXTree, trajectory, two responses

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": user_prompt}]
input_ids = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages, tokenize=True, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt",
).to(model.device)

with torch.no_grad():
    output = model.generate(input_ids=input_ids, max_new_tokens=2048, do_sample=False)

response = tokenizer.decode(output[0][len(input_ids[0]):], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(response)
```

**Example output:**
```xml
<State>The user is on the DuckDuckGo homepage with a search box visible.
Relevant AXTree elements: [1] textbox 'Search', [2] button 'Search'.</State>
<Criteria>1. Goal alignment (weight 0.6) — Does the action advance the search task?
2. Element reference accuracy (weight 0.25) — Is the referenced element correct?
3. Efficiency (weight 0.15) — Does the action avoid unnecessary steps?</Criteria>
<Analysis>Response 1 directly fills the search query into the textbox, which is the
most direct path to completing the search task. Response 2 clicks an irrelevant link
that does not contribute to the search goal.</Analysis>
<Answer>Response 1</Answer>
```

## Training Details

| | Stage 1: Reasoning Distillation | Stage 2: RLVR |
|---|---|---|
| Method | Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) | GRPO with binary verifiable rewards |
| Data | 9,642 teacher-distilled examples | 18,921 preference pairs |
| Teacher | o3 | — |
| Base Model | [Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct) | Stage 1 checkpoint |
| Fine-tuning | LoRA (rank 128, lr 8e-4) | FSDP + LoRA (lr 7e-6) |
| Framework | [LLaMA-Factory](https://github.com/hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory) | [veRL](https://github.com/volcengine/verl) |
| Hardware | 8 × NVIDIA A100-80GB | 8 × NVIDIA A100-80GB |
| Source Data | [WebPRM Collection](https://huggingface.co/datasets/LangAGI-Lab/WebPRMCollection_preference_pair) (~30k step-level preference pairs from Mind2Web) |

**Key training insights** (from ablation studies in the paper):
- Explicit principles are essential — removing them notably degrades performance, especially on out-of-domain environments.
- Cold-start RL without reasoning distillation is unstable across environments.
- Reasoning distillation provides stable discrimination, while RL acts as an amplifier that widens the margin between correct and incorrect judgments.

## Intended Uses

WebArbiter-7B is designed to:
- **Evaluate web agent actions**: Given a web state and two candidate actions, determine which better advances the user's task.
- **Guide trajectory search**: Serve as a reward signal for Best-of-N sampling or tree search during web agent execution.
- **Provide interpretable feedback**: Generate structured justifications explaining why one action is preferred, useful for debugging and analysis.

## Limitations

- **Text-only observations**: WebArbiter relies on accessibility tree representations without visual observations. In environments where layout, spatial arrangement, or visual cues carry task-relevant information, this text-only formulation may miss critical signals.
- **English-only**: Training and evaluation are conducted exclusively in English-language web environments.
- **Safe-action bias**: The model may sometimes overvalue cautious actions (e.g., hover over click) because the accessibility tree does not encode interaction effects.
- **Element reference hallucination**: When a candidate action's reasoning is strongly task-aligned, the model may trust the semantic signal over low-level bid verification, potentially missing incorrect element references.

## License

This model is released under [Apache 2.0](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0), following the base model [Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct).

## Related Resources

| Resource | Link |
|----------|------|
| WebArbiter-8B-Qwen3 (strongest) | [ZYao720/WebArbiter-8B-Qwen3](https://huggingface.co/ZYao720/WebArbiter-8B-Qwen3) |
| WebArbiter-4B-Qwen3 | [ZYao720/WebArbiter-4B-Qwen3](https://huggingface.co/ZYao720/WebArbiter-4B-Qwen3) |
| WebArbiter-3B | [ZYao720/WebArbiter-3B](https://huggingface.co/ZYao720/WebArbiter-3B) |
| WEBPRMBENCH (benchmark) | [ZYao720/WEBPRMBENCH](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZYao720/WEBPRMBENCH) |
| Training Data | [ZYao720/WebArbiter-Data](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZYao720/WebArbiter-Data) |
| Search Trajectories | [ZYao720/WebArbiter-Trajectories](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZYao720/WebArbiter-Trajectories) |

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{zhang2026ZYao720principleguidedreasoningprocess,
      title={WebArbiter: A Principle-Guided Reasoning Process Reward Model for Web Agents}, 
      author={Yao Zhang and Shijie Tang and Zeyu Li and Zhen Han and Volker Tresp},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2601.21872},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.AI},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21872}, 
}
```
