HyWe: Unifying Search and Operation for Real-World Hybrid Web Tasks
Zijian Cai, Haowei Liu, Kailai Chen, Lin Peng, Cong Wan, Ziqi Zhang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu, Haiyang Xu
Abstract
Real-world hybrid web tasks need both information gathering and page interaction, yet search-based and operation-based agents are developed and evaluated separately. To bridge this gap, we introduce HyWe, a framework that unifies both capabilities within one model and trajectory. Its two modes use dedicated prompts and tool sets to sustain sub-goal execution; explicit switching selects the needed capability, and shared history lets each mode build on the other's findings. To provide demonstrations of these behaviors, we develop HyWeCollector, a fully automatic pipeline that uses task prototypes, four switching patterns, and multi-agent synthesis to produce verified hybrid trajectories. We train HyWe-35B on these demonstrations to unify efficient information gathering and browser interaction in a single 35B web agent. To evaluate hybrid task completion, we introduce HyWeBench: 100 human-written tasks on websites distinct from training, with human-written sub-goal checklists and an outcome-based evaluation pipeline. Hybrid training enables HyWe-35B to achieve 47.0% success on this benchmark, improving on the untrained base model by 19.0 percentage points and outperforming existing search-based and operation-based agents. Even before training, the same base model solves 28.0% of tasks with HyWe, versus 11.0% with all tools under one prompt. Beyond hybrid tasks, HyWe-35B achieves 59.0% and 88.3% success on Online-Mind2Web and WebVoyager, outperforming existing open-source baselines and cutting action cost per successful task by 48.3% and 51.9% compared with Fara-7B.