<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="bai-etal-2026-asyncwebrl">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Hao</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Bai</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Rui</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Yang</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Chenlu</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Ye</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Spencer</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Whitehead</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Aviral</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Kumar</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Tong</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-462-0</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>Training vision-language web agents with multi-step RL is compute-intensive, with two dominant forms of inefficiency: idle GPUs in synchronous RL, and trajectories that use more steps and tokens than necessary. We present AsyncWebRL, which addresses both. On the system side, an asynchronous design overlaps rollout, gradient update, and policy refresh across iterations, paired with two web-agent-specific adaptations, namely an everlasting rollout pool and lightweight screenshot handling, that together deliver up to a 2.9\times end-to-end training-throughput speedup over the previously fastest open synchronous pipeline (WebGym). On the algorithmic side, we identify the per-trajectory normalizer 1/|τ_i| in multi-step GRPO as the root cause of trajectory-level and token-level inefficiency: because failures are systematically longer than successes, it down-weights the negative gradient on failed tokens, so the policy keeps producing verbose memory schemas. Replacing 1/|τ_i| with a constant 1/k breaks this coupling, contracting trajectories while preserving aggregate success. Together, these contributions set a new open-source state of the art on the WebGym out-of-distribution test split (+5.8% relative over the 42.9% prior best), with the largest gains on the harder slices (+42% relative on Medium, +48% relative on Hard).</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">bai-etal-2026-asyncwebrl</identifier>
    <identifier type="doi">10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1352</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1352/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-10</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>28704</start>
            <end>28722</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents
%A Bai, Hao
%A Yang, Rui
%A Ye, Chenlu
%A Whitehead, Spencer
%A Kumar, Aviral
%A Zhang, Tong
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F bai-etal-2026-asyncwebrl
%X Training vision-language web agents with multi-step RL is compute-intensive, with two dominant forms of inefficiency: idle GPUs in synchronous RL, and trajectories that use more steps and tokens than necessary. We present AsyncWebRL, which addresses both. On the system side, an asynchronous design overlaps rollout, gradient update, and policy refresh across iterations, paired with two web-agent-specific adaptations, namely an everlasting rollout pool and lightweight screenshot handling, that together deliver up to a 2.9\times end-to-end training-throughput speedup over the previously fastest open synchronous pipeline (WebGym). On the algorithmic side, we identify the per-trajectory normalizer 1/|τ_i| in multi-step GRPO as the root cause of trajectory-level and token-level inefficiency: because failures are systematically longer than successes, it down-weights the negative gradient on failed tokens, so the policy keeps producing verbose memory schemas. Replacing 1/|τ_i| with a constant 1/k breaks this coupling, contracting trajectories while preserving aggregate success. Together, these contributions set a new open-source state of the art on the WebGym out-of-distribution test split (+5.8% relative over the 42.9% prior best), with the largest gains on the harder slices (+42% relative on Medium, +48% relative on Hard).
%R 10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1352
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1352/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1352
%P 28704-28722

Markdown (Informal)

[AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1352/) (Bai et al., Findings 2026)

• AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents (Bai et al., Findings 2026)

ACL

• Hao Bai, Rui Yang, Chenlu Ye, Spencer Whitehead, Aviral Kumar, and Tong Zhang. 2026. AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 28704–28722, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.