BaRA: BFS-and-Reflection Web Data Collection Agent

2026-05-02

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of efficiently and reliably discovering valid web pages and extracting accessible multimodal content—such as text, images, and videos—under a fixed interaction budget. The authors propose BaRA, an agent that combines breadth-first search for link discovery with a validity verification mechanism to filter out hallucinated or broken links. To ensure content accessibility, BaRA employs rule-based multimodal checks and incorporates a history-aware introspection module to recover from execution failures and incomplete outputs. As the first approach to integrate budget constraints with site-level multimodal data collection, BaRA consistently outperforms existing agents in both synthetic and real-world website evaluations, achieving significant improvements in valid link discovery rates and successful retrieval of downloadable multimodal content.

Abstract

Large language model (LLM)-based web agents reduce manual scripting for web data collection, yet on live websites, they often miss relevant pages, return incomplete multimodal outputs, or return media URLs that are not directly downloadable. We present BFS-and-Reflection Agent (BaRA), a framework for site-level collection under a fixed interaction budget. The framework combines bounded breadth-first search (BFS) traversal with history-based self-reflection. We evaluate BaRA on 50 synthetic websites with ground-truth reference sets. We additionally test on three public websites with cluttered or dynamic layouts. BaRA outperforms Pure LLM, SeeAct-Vision, and Browser-use on link discovery and downloadable multimodal extraction, with the largest gains in download-valid image and video recovery. Our code is available at https://github.com/MLAI-Yonsei/BaRA-Agent.

Problem

• budget-constrained
• web data collection
• multimodal
• reliable
• site-level

Innovation

• budget-constrained data collection
• multimodal web extraction
• link liveness verification
• self-reflection agent
• LLM-based web navigation