WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency

Pengjun Xie (Alibaba Group) · Fei Huang (Alibaba Group) · Robert Tang (Yale University) · Jingren Zhou (Alibaba Group) · Jialong Wu (School of Software, Tsinghua University) · Baixuan Li (Southeast University) · Runnan Fang (Zhejiang University) · Wenbiao Yin (nanjing university) · Liwen Zhang (Alibaba Group) · Zhenglin Wang (Southeast University) · Zhengwei Tao (Peking University) · Ding-Chu Zhang (Nanjing University) · Zekun Xi (Zhejiang University) · Yong Jiang (Alibaba DAMO Academy)
agent training insightsagentic systemsautonomous researchcold startdata-centric approachempirical evaluationsend-to-end agentsgaia benchmarkgeneralisationmulti-step reasoningreact formatreinforcement learningsupervised fine-tuningtrajectories samplingweb agentwebwalkerqa benchmark

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 format, WebDancer. Empirical evaluations on the challenging GAIA and WebWalkerQA benchmarks 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.