The present disclosure is generally directed to methods, apparatus, and computer-readable media (transitory and non-transitory) for learning to automatically navigate interactive web documents and/or websites. More particularly, various approaches are presented for training various deep Q network (DQN) agents to perform various tasks associated with reinforcement learning, including hierarchical reinforcement learning, in challenging web navigation environments with sparse rewards and large state and action spaces. These agents include a web navigation agent that can use learned value function(s) to automatically navigate through interactive web documents, as well as a training agent, referred to herein as a “meta-trainer,” that can be trained to generate synthetic training examples. Some approaches described herein may be implemented when expert demonstrations are available. Other approaches described herein may be implemented when expert demonstrations are not available. In either case, dense, potential-based rewards may be used to augment the training.