WebGPT is a pioneering web-browsing QA system developed by Nakano et al. (2021) at OpenAI that fine-tunes GPT-3 to answer long-form questions by interacting with a text-based web browser and optimizing responses through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).¹⁾ With 1,720 citations, it established foundational techniques for retrieval-augmented generation and web-browsing agents that influenced subsequent systems including ChatGPT's browsing capabilities.

arXiv:2112.09332

WebGPT operates through a custom text-based browser environment that presents web pages as simplified text. The model issues structured commands:

• Search [query]: Execute a Bing search query
• Click [link]: Navigate to a specific link on the current page
• Scroll [direction]: Move up or down the current page
• Quote [text]: Extract and save a passage as a reference
• End: Terminate browsing and compose the final answer

At each step, the model receives a summary of the current browser state (page content, URL, scroll position) and selects the next action. The browsing session continues until the model issues an End command, reaches a maximum number of actions, or exceeds the total reference length.

The training process combines two complementary approaches:

Human demonstrators use the same text-based browser to answer questions, generating supervised training data of (question, browsing trajectory, answer) triples.²⁾

A reward model $R_\phi$ is trained on pairwise human comparisons:

$$\mathcal{L}(\phi) = -\mathbb{E}_{(y_w, y_l) \sim \mathcal{D}} \left[\log \sigma\left(R_\phi(y_w) - R_\phi(y_l)\right)\right]$$

where $y_w$ is the human-preferred answer and $y_l$ is the rejected one. The policy is then optimized via PPO to maximize this learned reward while maintaining proximity to the behavior-cloned policy through a KL penalty:

$$\max_\theta \mathbb{E}_{y \sim \pi_\theta} \left[R_\phi(y)\right] - \beta \, \text{KL}(\pi_\theta \| \pi_{\text{BC}})$$

# Simplified WebGPT browsing loop
ACTIONS = ["search", "click", "scroll_up", "scroll_down", "quote", "end"]
 
def webgpt_answer(question, policy_model, browser, max_steps=20):
    browser.reset()
    references = []
    context = f"Question: {question}\n"
 
    for step in range(max_steps):
        browser_state = browser.get_state_summary()
        action, param = policy_model.predict(context + browser_state)
 
        if action == "search":
            browser.search(param)
        elif action == "click":
            browser.click(param)
        elif action == "quote":
            ref = browser.extract_quote(param)
            references.append(ref)
        elif action == "end":
            break
 
        context += f"Action: {action} {param}\n"
    return policy_model.compose_answer(question, references)
 
def train_reward_model(reward_model, preference_pairs):
    for answer_w, answer_l in preference_pairs:
        reward_w = reward_model(answer_w)
        reward_l = reward_model(answer_l)
        loss = -log_sigmoid(reward_w - reward_l)
        loss.backward()

• Best model preferred over human demonstrator answers 56% of the time on ELI5³⁾
• Preferred over highest-voted Reddit answers 69% of the time
• Factually accurate 75% of the time; both true and informative 54%
• Significantly reduces hallucinations compared to unaided GPT-3⁴⁾
• Demonstrates that web browsing + RLHF is a viable path to factual QA

• Nakano et al. "WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback" (2021)
• Ouyang et al. "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback" (2022)
• Fan et al. "ELI5: Long Form Question Answering" (2019)
• Brown et al. "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" (GPT-3, 2020)

• PaLM-E: Embodied Multimodal Language Model
• RAP: Reasoning via Planning
• ExpeL: Experiential Learning Agents