Papers › WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal

WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal

13 Jan 2025arXiv:2501.07572archive 2025-07-28

Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Zhenglin Wang, Zekun Xi, Runnan Fang, Linhai Zhang, Yulan He, Deyu Zhou, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) demonstrates remarkable performance across tasks in open-domain question-answering. However, traditional search engines may retrieve shallow content, limiting the ability of LLMs to handle complex, multi-layered information. To address it, we introduce WebWalkerQA, a benchmark designed to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal. It evaluates the capacity of LLMs to traverse a website's subpages to extract high-quality data systematically. We propose WebWalker, which is a multi-agent framework that mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm. Extensive experimental results show that WebWalkerQA is challenging and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker, through the horizontal and vertical integration in real-world scenarios.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

alibaba-nlp/webwalker officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubApache-2.0 report
alibaba-nlp/webagent mentioned on GitHubApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

BenchmarkingOpen-Domain Question AnsweringQuestion AnsweringRAGRetrievalRetrieval-augmented Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBARTBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionRAGResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections