WebShaper: Agentically Data Synthesizing via Information-Seeking Formalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tao, Zhengwei, Wu, Jialong, Yin, Wenbiao, Zhang, Junkai, Li, Baixuan, Shen, Haiyang, Li, Kuan, Zhang, Liwen, Wang, Xinyu, Jiang, Yong, Xie, Pengjun, Huang, Fei, Zhou, Jingren
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tao, Zhengwei
Wu, Jialong
Yin, Wenbiao
Zhang, Junkai
Li, Baixuan
Shen, Haiyang
Li, Kuan
Zhang, Liwen
Wang, Xinyu
Jiang, Yong
Xie, Pengjun
Huang, Fei
Zhou, Jingren
author_facet Tao, Zhengwei
Wu, Jialong
Yin, Wenbiao
Zhang, Junkai
Li, Baixuan
Shen, Haiyang
Li, Kuan
Zhang, Liwen
Wang, Xinyu
Jiang, Yong
Xie, Pengjun
Huang, Fei
Zhou, Jingren
contents The advent of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents has revolutionized artificial intelligence by enabling solutions to complex, open-ended tasks through web-based information-seeking (IS) capabilities. The scarcity of high-quality training data has limited the development of IS agents. Existing approaches typically adopt an information-driven paradigm that first collects web data and then generates questions based on the retrieval. However, this may lead to inconsistency between information structure and reasoning structure, question and answer. To mitigate, we propose a formalization-driven IS data synthesis framework WebShaper to construct a dataset. WebShaper systematically formalizes IS tasks through set theory. Central to the formalization is the concept of Knowledge Projections (KP), which enables precise control over reasoning structure by KP operation compositions. During synthesis, we begin by creating seed tasks, then use a multi-step expansion process. At each step, an agentic Expander expands the current formal question more complex with retrieval and validation tools based on our formalization. We train our model on the synthesized dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that WebShaper achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-sourced IS agents on GAIA and WebWalkerQA benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_15061
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WebShaper: Agentically Data Synthesizing via Information-Seeking Formalization
Tao, Zhengwei
Wu, Jialong
Yin, Wenbiao
Zhang, Junkai
Li, Baixuan
Shen, Haiyang
Li, Kuan
Zhang, Liwen
Wang, Xinyu
Jiang, Yong
Xie, Pengjun
Huang, Fei
Zhou, Jingren
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The advent of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents has revolutionized artificial intelligence by enabling solutions to complex, open-ended tasks through web-based information-seeking (IS) capabilities. The scarcity of high-quality training data has limited the development of IS agents. Existing approaches typically adopt an information-driven paradigm that first collects web data and then generates questions based on the retrieval. However, this may lead to inconsistency between information structure and reasoning structure, question and answer. To mitigate, we propose a formalization-driven IS data synthesis framework WebShaper to construct a dataset. WebShaper systematically formalizes IS tasks through set theory. Central to the formalization is the concept of Knowledge Projections (KP), which enables precise control over reasoning structure by KP operation compositions. During synthesis, we begin by creating seed tasks, then use a multi-step expansion process. At each step, an agentic Expander expands the current formal question more complex with retrieval and validation tools based on our formalization. We train our model on the synthesized dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that WebShaper achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-sourced IS agents on GAIA and WebWalkerQA benchmarks.
title WebShaper: Agentically Data Synthesizing via Information-Seeking Formalization
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15061