Skim: Speculative Execution for Fast and Efficient Web Agents

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 15 May 2026] Skim: Speculative Execution for Fast and Efficient Web Agents Mike Wong, Kevin Hsieh, Suman Nath, Ravi Netravali Skim is a speculative execution framework for web agents that exploits the predictable structure of purpose-built websites. Today's web-agent expense is not intrinsic to the tasks but a property of how agents are composed: frontier-model inference, browser rendering, and ReAct-style planning are applied to every step of every task regardless of complexity. Skim's key observation is that websites enforce stable URL patterns, answer formats, and task-to-trajectory mappings across queries of the same type, so most queries can bypass these heavyweight components entirely. An offline profiler captures these patterns once per site. At runtime, Skim matches each query to a template, synthesizes the destination URL, and extracts the answer with a small model. A lightweight verifier gates each fast-path output against the query and schema; rare misspeculations cascade to the full agent, warm-started by the fast path's final URL to preserve upstream trajectory progress. Across standard web-agent benchmarks paired with three backboneagents (WebVoyager, AgentOccam, BrowserUse), Skim reduces median per-task cost by 1.9x and latency by 33.4% with no accuracy loss. Comments: 14 pages, 21 figures Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Operating Systems (cs.OS) Cite as: arXiv:2605.16565 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.16565v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16565 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mike Wong [view email] [v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 19:12:43 UTC (4,892 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.OS References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)