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WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency

The paper proposes a framework for building end-to-end agentic information seeking agents through a combination of data construction, trajectory sampling, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, showcasing its effectiveness on information seeking benchmarks.

Year
2025
Venue
arXiv 2025
Authors
12
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arxiv.org/abs/2505.22648ARXIV-DEFAULT
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Abstract

Addressing intricate real-world problems necessitates in-depth information seeking and multi-step reasoning. Recent progress in agentic systems, exemplified by Deep Research, underscores the potential for autonomous multi-step research. In this work, we present a cohesive paradigm for building end-to-end agentic information seeking agents from a data-centric and training-stage perspective. Our approach consists of four key stages: (1) browsing data construction, (2) trajectories sampling, (3) supervised fine-tuning for effective cold start, and (4) reinforcement learning for enhanced generalisation. We instantiate this framework in a web agent based on the ReAct, WebDancer. Empirical evaluations on the challenging information seeking benchmarks, GAIA and WebWalkerQA, demonstrate the strong performance of WebDancer, achieving considerable results and highlighting the efficacy of our training paradigm. Further analysis of agent training provides valuable insights and actionable, systematic pathways for developing more capable agentic models. The codes and demo will be released in https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/WebAgent.

Authors

12