Interpretable Early Termination of Web Navigation Agents via Closed Sequential Pattern Mining
TL;DR
This work applies closed sequential pattern mining (BIDE+) to K-step prefixes of agent execution traces to produce a small, human-reviewable failure-signature library that organizes into a four-category failure taxonomy with associated repair recommendations.
Abstract
Web navigation agents built on open-weight language models fail often and fail late, with most of the tokens spent after the trajectory has become unrecoverable. Recent work has shown that early termination is a viable cost-reduction strategy, but existing approaches produce opaque termination decisions that do not support diagnosis or human oversight. In this work we apply closed sequential pattern mining (BIDE+) to K-step prefixes of agent execution traces to produce a small, human-reviewable failure-signature library that organizes into a four-category failure taxonomy with associated repair recommendations. We use a multi-variant evaluation protocol that explicitly removes contamination artifacts (zero-step crashes and trivially separable single-step successes) so that reported detection accuracy reflects behavioral discrimination rather than trace-length distributions. We evaluate our methodology on 1,544 MiniWoB++ traces collected from three open-weight language models, achieving the best F1 at K=3 on the Exclude-errors configuration across eight methods (0.717), recovering 88% of test-set failures within three steps, and supporting an early-termination policy that saves 26.3% of tokens at 92% precision.
