WebDS: A Benchmark for Web-based Data Science

WebDS is the first end-to-end benchmark designed for evaluating agents on real-world web-based data science workflows. It contains 870 tasks across 29 containerized websites spanning 10 domains, including economics, health, climate, and scientific research.

Agents are tested on:

• Multi-hop web navigation
• Structured and unstructured data processing
• Tool usage (e.g., Python scripts, visualization tools)
• Downstream task completion (e.g., reports, Reddit posts)

Tasks reflect realistic data science scenarios, such as acquiring data from government portals, comparing datasets across sites, and synthesizing insights in report-ready formats.

📦 Contents

This repository includes:

• tasks/: JSON files for all 870 benchmark tasks, with metadata and intents
• websites/: Dockerized replicas of 29 benchmark sites for reproducibility
• webds_experiments/: Code for running LLM-based agents and collecting evaluation metrics

🌍 Hosted Demo (Docker)

You can try a live version of the benchmark via: http://ec2-18-220-211-153.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com:3333

This is useful for previewing the benchmark environment or debugging agent behavior before running large-scale evaluations.

📊 Evaluation

WebDS supports both:

• Automatic scoring via reference ground truths (for QA-type tasks)
• LLM-as-a-Judge scoring with 1–5 granular feedback and error attribution (for open-ended tasks)

📜 Citation

If you use WebDS in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{yam2025webds,
  title = {WebDS: An End-to-End Benchmark for Web-based Data Science},
  author = {Yam, Hong Meng and Hsu, Ethan and Bouissou, Ines and John, Aaron Murali and Thota, Raj and Koe, Josh and Putta, Vivek Sarath and Dharesan, G K and Spangher, Alexander and Murty, Shikhar and Huang, Tenghao and Manning, Christopher D.},
  booktitle = {ArXiV},
  year = {2025}
}

Setup of docker file

This file host the instructions for our Docker image.

Docker image

Download the image webbenchdocker.tar.gz from the following link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LnBfeUqwDm6kiUxDC-vF7vADsWdaAqHp

docker load --input webbenchdocker.tar.gz
docker run --name webbench -p 3333:80 -d webbenchdocker

Shopping Website (OneStopShop) from Webarena

Download the image tar from the following mirrors:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gxXalk9O0p9eu1YkIJcmZta1nvvyAJpA/view?usp=sharing
• https://archive.org/download/webarena-env-shopping-image
• http://metis.lti.cs.cmu.edu/webarena-images/shopping_final_0712.tar

docker load --input shopping_final_0712.tar
docker run --name shopping -p 7770:80 -d shopping_final_0712
# wait ~1 min to wait all services to start

docker exec shopping /var/www/magento2/bin/magento setup:store-config:set --base-url="http://<your-server-hostname>:7770" # no trailing slash
docker exec shopping mysql -u magentouser -pMyPassword magentodb -e  'UPDATE core_config_data SET value="http://<your-server-hostname>:7770/" WHERE path = "web/secure/base_url";'
docker exec shopping /var/www/magento2/bin/magento cache:flush

Now you can visit http://<your-server-hostname>:7770.

E-commerce Content Management System (CMS) from webarena

Download the image tar from the following mirrors:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1See0ZhJRw0WTTL9y8hFlgaduwPZ_nGfd/view?usp=sharing
• https://archive.org/download/webarena-env-shopping-admin-image
• http://metis.lti.cs.cmu.edu/webarena-images/shopping_admin_final_0719.tar

docker load --input shopping_admin_final_0719.tar
docker run --name shopping_admin -p 7780:80 -d shopping_admin_final_0719
# wait ~1 min to wait all services to start

docker exec shopping_admin /var/www/magento2/bin/magento setup:store-config:set --base-url="http://<your-server-hostname>:7780" # no trailing slash
docker exec shopping_admin mysql -u magentouser -pMyPassword magentodb -e  'UPDATE core_config_data SET value="http://<your-server-hostname>:7780/" WHERE path = "web/secure/base_url";'
docker exec shopping_admin /var/www/magento2/bin/magento cache:flush

Now you can visit http://<your-server-hostname>:7780/admin.

Social Forum Website (Reddit)

Download the image tar from the following mirrors:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Qpp1iu_mPqzgO_73Z9BnFjHrzmX9DGf/view?usp=sharing
• https://archive.org/download/webarena-env-forum-image
• http://metis.lti.cs.cmu.edu/webarena-images/postmill-populated-exposed-withimg.tar

docker load --input postmill-populated-exposed-withimg.tar
docker run --name forum -p 4444:80 -d postmill-populated-exposed-withimg

Now you can visit http://<your-server-hostname>:4444/.