TraceWeaver: Language-Conditioned Action Selection for Web Agents via Coupled Rollouts and Episodic Memory

Shuang Cao, Rui Li, Louise Ruihua Liu, Alexandre Duprey


Abstract
Web agents must choose queries, clicks, form fills, and tool calls from language instructions while preserving constraints whose consequences may appear several steps later. We study this challenge as language-conditioned delayed-constraint tracking and present TraceWeaver, which couples linear-time latent rollouts, entity-centric episodic memory, and a learned critic for budgeted action selection. Across WebShop (500 episodes), Mind2Web (1,000-task split), WebArena (812-task split), and WorkArena (165-task enterprise split), TraceWeaver shows task-success gains of +2.7 to +4.7 over baselines under a matched test-time budget. Shared-pool controls reduce the confound between selection quality and proposal quality, while a language-phenomenon analysis concentrates the gains on tasks with dense, conflicting, or delayed constraints.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.51
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1018–1035
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.51/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuang Cao, Rui Li, Louise Ruihua Liu, and Alexandre Duprey. 2026. TraceWeaver: Language-Conditioned Action Selection for Web Agents via Coupled Rollouts and Episodic Memory. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 1018–1035, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TraceWeaver: Language-Conditioned Action Selection for Web Agents via Coupled Rollouts and Episodic Memory (Cao et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.51.pdf