Weblica: Scalable and Reproducible Training Environments for Visual Web Agents
Apple ML research introduces Weblica, a framework using HTTP caching and LLM-based environment synthesis to create reproducible and scalable web training environments for visual web agents. Their best model, Weblica-8B, outperforms open-weight baselines and is competitive with API models. The article also covers 'Rephrasing the Web' for data-efficient language modeling.
content type paperpublished July 2026
Weblica: Scalable and Reproducible Training Environments for Visual Web Agents
AuthorsOğuzhan Fatih Kar, Roman Bachmann, Yuanzheng Gong, Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen, Afshin Dehghan
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The web is complex, open-ended, and constantly changing, making it challenging to scale training data for visual web agents. Existing data collection attempts remain limited to offline trajectories for supervised fine-tuning or a handful of simulated environments for RL training, thus failing to capture web diversity. We propose Weblica (Web Replica), a framework for constructing reproducible and scalable web environments. Our framework leverages 1) HTTP-level caching to capture and replay stable visual states while preserving interactive behavior and 2) LLM-based environment synthesis grounded in real-world websites and core web navigation skills. Using this framework, we scale RL training to thousands of diverse environments and tasks. Our best model, Weblica-8B, outperforms open-weight baselines of similar size across multiple web navigation benchmarks while using fewer inference steps, scales favorably with additional test-time compute, and is competitive with API models.
Rephrasing the Web: A Recipe for Compute and Data-Efficient Language Modeling
August 6, 2024research area Methods and Algorithms, research area Speech and Natural Language Processingconference ACL
Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, which are often unstructured, noisy, and poorly phrased. Current scaling laws show that learning from such data requires an abundance of both compute and data, which grows with the size of the model being trained. This is infeasible both because of the large compute costs and duration associated with pre-training, and the impending scarcity of high-quality data on the web. In this…
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Rephrasing the Web: A Recipe for Compute and Data-Efficient Language Modeling
May 7, 2024research area Methods and Algorithms, research area Speech and Natural Language ProcessingWorkshop at ICLR
This paper has been accepted at the Data Problems for Foundation Models workshop at ICLR 2024.
Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, which are often unstructured, noisy, and poorly phrased. Current scaling laws show that learning from such data requires an abundance of both compute and data, which grows with the size of the model being trained. This is infeasible both because of the large compute costs and duration…
Read more