WebDS: An End-to-End Benchmark for Web-based Data Science

Abstract: A large portion of real-world data science tasks are complex and require multi-hop web-based interactions: finding appropriate data available on the internet, synthesizing real-time data of various modalities from different locations, and producing summarized analyses. Existing web benchmarks often focus on simplistic interactions, such as form submissions or e-commerce transactions, and often do not require diverse tool-using capabilities required for web based data science. Conversely, traditional data science benchmarks typically concentrate on static, often textually bound datasets and do not assess end-to-end workflows that encompass data acquisition, cleaning, analysis, and insight generation. In response, we introduce WebDS, the first end-to-end web-based data science benchmark. It comprises 870 web-based data science tasks across 29 diverse websites from structured government data portals to unstructured news media, challenging agents to perform complex, multi-step operations requiring the use of tools and heterogeneous data formats that better reflect the realities of modern data analytics. Evaluations of current SOTA LLM agents indicate significant performance gaps in accomplishing these tasks. For instance, Browser Use, which accomplishes 80% of tasks on Web Voyager, successfully completes only 15% of tasks in WebDS, which our analysis suggests is due to new failure modes like poor information grounding, repetitive behavior and shortcut-taking that agents performing WebDS' tasks display. By providing a more robust and realistic testing ground, WebDS sets the stage for significant advances in the development of practically useful LLM-based data science.