Researcher(s)
Date of Talk
Bio
Rui Xi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He also received his MASc from UBC and his BEng from Sun Yat-sen University in China. His research interests include blockchain and smart contract security, program analysis, and, more recently, the reliability and trustworthiness of LLM-based agentic systems. He worked on the NLWeb project at Microsoft Research, Redmond, and will share insights on how NLWeb helps achieve trustworthy agentic systems that automate web operations.
Abstract
An agent is an LLM capable of interacting with the web. Today’s agents often operate by clicking GUI elements, a mode that is neither scalable nor reliable and is prone to prompt-injection attacks. We argue that a practical path to the Agentic Web requires a first-class action layer built on a concept we introduce in this paper: Web Verbs—site-provided, typed action contracts that agents can discover, retrieve, and program against. Critically, a verb is a function that may call a server API or encapsulate a client-side interaction sequence such as authentication, navigation, and multistep UI workflows. Verbs expose capabilities rather than pixels, carry preconditions, postconditions, and policies, and enable large language models to synthesize auditable programs via programming language interfaces.
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