{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/beyond-browsing-api-based-web-agents","title":"Beyond Browsing: API-Based Web Agents","arxiv_id":"2410.16464","date":"2024-10-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yueqi Song","Frank Xu","Shuyan Zhou","Graham Neubig"],"abstract":"Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing. However, there is also another interface designed specifically for machine interaction with online content: application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper we ask -- what if we were to take tasks traditionally tackled by Browsing Agents, and give AI agents access to APIs? To do so, we propose two varieties of agents: (1) an API-calling agent that attempts to perform online tasks through APIs only, similar to traditional coding agents, and (2) a Hybrid Agent that can interact with online data through both web browsing and APIs. In experiments on WebArena, a widely-used and realistic benchmark for web navigation tasks, we find that API-Based Agents outperform web Browsing Agents. Hybrid Agents out-perform both others nearly uniformly across tasks, resulting in a more than 24.0% absolute improvement over web browsing alone, achieving a success rate of 38.9%, the SOTA performance among task-agnostic agents. These results strongly suggest that when APIs are available, they present an attractive alternative to relying on web browsing alone.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16464v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16464v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"beyond-browsing-api-based-web-agents","repo_url":"https://github.com/yueqis/api-based-agent","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2410.16464","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.16464","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.16464"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/yueqis/api-based-agent","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1,"unverified":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":3,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"45c33af255d83365","entry":"get_error_prefix","repo":"yueqis/api-based-agent","repo_kind":"official","path":"agenthub/codeact_agent/codeact_agent.py","file_url":"https://github.com/yueqis/api-based-agent/blob/HEAD/agenthub/codeact_agent/codeact_agent.py","link_basis":"plan_row","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"45c33af255d83365"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"62c1ca267cdcdeee","entry":"get_browse_prompt","repo":"yueqis/api-based-agent","repo_kind":"official","path":"agenthub/codeact_agent/codeact_agent.py","file_url":"https://github.com/yueqis/api-based-agent/blob/HEAD/agenthub/codeact_agent/codeact_agent.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"62c1ca267cdcdeee"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"6311e9291b00ae61","entry":"get_field_info","repo":"yueqis/api-based-agent","repo_kind":"official","path":"opendevin/core/config.py","file_url":"https://github.com/yueqis/api-based-agent/blob/HEAD/opendevin/core/config.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"6311e9291b00ae61"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}