Baixuan Li
2026
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling
Runnan Fang | Shihao Cai | Baixuan Li | Jialong Wu | Guangyu Li | Wenbiao Yin | Xinyu Wang | Xiaobin Wang | Liangcai Su | Zhen Zhang | Shibin Wu | Zhengwei Tao | Yong Jiang | Pengjun Xie | Ningyu Zhang | Fei Huang | Wentao Zhang | Jingren Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Runnan Fang | Shihao Cai | Baixuan Li | Jialong Wu | Guangyu Li | Wenbiao Yin | Xinyu Wang | Xiaobin Wang | Liangcai Su | Zhen Zhang | Shibin Wu | Zhengwei Tao | Yong Jiang | Pengjun Xie | Ningyu Zhang | Fei Huang | Wentao Zhang | Jingren Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Advanced agentic intelligence is a prerequisite for deploying Large Language Models in practical, real-world applications. Diverse real-world APIs demand precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. The breadth of function-calling competence is closely tied to the diversity of environments in which agents are trained. In this work, we scale up environments as a step towards advancing general agentic intelligence. This gives rise to two central challenges: (i) how to scale environments in a principled manner, and (ii) how to effectively train agentic capabilities from experiences derived through interactions with these environments. To address these, we design a scalable framework that automatically constructs heterogeneous environments that are fully simulated, broadening the space of function-calling scenarios. We further adapt a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy: first endowing agents with fundamental agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. Extensive experiments on agentic benchmarks, -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench, demonstrate that our trained model, AgentScaler, significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability.
Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking
Baixuan Li | Jialong Wu | Wenbiao Yin | Kuan Li | Zhongwang Zhang | Huifeng Yin | Zhengwei Tao | Liwen Zhang | Pengjun Xie | Jingren Zhou | Yong Jiang | Wentao Zhang | Zhiqiang Gao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Baixuan Li | Jialong Wu | Wenbiao Yin | Kuan Li | Zhongwang Zhang | Huifeng Yin | Zhengwei Tao | Liwen Zhang | Pengjun Xie | Jingren Zhou | Yong Jiang | Wentao Zhang | Zhiqiang Gao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Information-seeking (IS) agents have achieved strong performance across a range of wide and deep search tasks, yet their tool use remains largely restricted to API-level snippet retrieval and URL-based page fetching, limiting access to the richer information available through real browsing. While full browser interaction could unlock deeper capabilities, its fine-grained control and verbose page content returns introduce substantial complexity for ReAct-style function-calling agents. To bridge this gap, we propose Nested Browser-Use Learning (NestBrowse), which introduces a minimal and complete browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. This design simplifies agentic reasoning while enabling effective deep-web information acquisition. Empirical results on challenging deep IS benchmarks demonstrate that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. Further in-depth analyses underscore its efficiency.
2025
RASPberry: Retrieval-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Self-Play with Reasoning Consistency for Multi-Hop Question Answering
Baixuan Li | Yunlong Fan | Tianyi Ma | Miao Gao | Chuanqi Shi | Zhiqiang Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Baixuan Li | Yunlong Fan | Tianyi Ma | Miao Gao | Chuanqi Shi | Zhiqiang Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Complex multi-hop question answering requires large language models (LLMs) not only to retrieve external knowledge but also to reason over the retrieved information in order to arrive at the final solution. This involves two key challenges: (i) how to effectively explore the solution space and generate more potentially correct solution candidates, and (ii) how to select the optimal solution from multiple solution candidates, both of which require a training-free approach without introducing a more powerful teacher model. To address these challenges, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Self-Play with Reasoning Consistency (RASPberry), which introduces a more flexible action-level sampling granularity compared to existing methods, leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search for efficient solution space exploration, and utilizes an enhanced version of reasoning consistency to guide the selection of the optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed RASPberry effectively tackles the two challenges outlined above, achieving more efficient RAG inference-time scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/BaixuanLi/RASPberry.
AutoEvolve: Automatically Evolving Queries for Applicable and Scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmarking
Ding-Chu Zhang | Xiaowen Zhang | Yue Fei | Renjun Hu | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi Zhou | Baixuan Li | Yu-Feng Li | Xing Shi | Wei Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Ding-Chu Zhang | Xiaowen Zhang | Yue Fei | Renjun Hu | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi Zhou | Baixuan Li | Yu-Feng Li | Xing Shi | Wei Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to address queries beyond their internal knowledge by integrating domain knowledge in specialized corpus, which necessitates the generation of benchmarks on specific corpus to evaluate RAG systems. However, existing automated generation methods exhibit Weak Applicability and Weak Scalability. Weak Applicability refers to the reliance on metadata from specific corpora for query generation, constraining applicability to other corpora. Weak Scalability is characterized by fixed query content after generation, unable to dynamically increase difficulty, limiting scalability of the query. To overcome these issues, we propose AutoEvolve, an applicable approach for dynamically evolving queries to construct scalable RAG benchmarks. Our approach is grounded in three key innovations: (i) a corpus-agnostic method for constructing the universal entity-document graph; (ii) a suite of evolution operations designed to dynamically update queries; and (iii) a difficulty-guided metric that directs query evolution process. Through experiments on three generated benchmarks, we demonstrate that AutoEvolve evolves queries that are significantly more challenging, paving the way for more applicable and scalable RAG evaluations.
EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent
Ding-Chu Zhang | Yida Zhao | Jialong Wu | Liwen Zhang | Baixuan Li | Wenbiao Yin | Yong Jiang | Yu-Feng Li | Kewei Tu | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ding-Chu Zhang | Yida Zhao | Jialong Wu | Liwen Zhang | Baixuan Li | Wenbiao Yin | Yong Jiang | Yu-Feng Li | Kewei Tu | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of agentic information seeking capabilities through the integration of tools such as search engines and web browsers. However, current mainstream approaches for enabling LLM web search proficiency face significant challenges: supervised fine-tuning struggles with data production in open-search domains, while RL converges quickly, limiting their data utilization efficiency. To address these issues, we propose EvolveSearch, a novel iterative self-evolution framework that combines SFT and RL to enhance agentic web search capabilities without any external human-annotated reasoning data. Extensive experiments on seven multi-hop question-answering (MHQA) benchmarks demonstrate that EvolveSearch consistently improves performance across iterations, ultimately achieving an average improvement of 4.7% over the current state-of-the-art across seven benchmarks, opening the door to self-evolution agentic capabilities in open web search domains.
2024
SEAVER: Attention Reallocation for Mitigating Distractions in Language Models for Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity Measurement
Baixuan Li | Yunlong Fan | Zhiqiang Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Baixuan Li | Yunlong Fan | Zhiqiang Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity (C-STS) introduces specific limiting conditions to the traditional Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task, posing challenges for STS models. Language models employing cross-encoding demonstrate satisfactory performance in STS, yet their effectiveness significantly diminishes in C-STS. In this work, we argue that the failure is due to the fact that the redundant information in the text distracts language models from the required condition-relevant information. To alleviate this, we propose Self-Augmentation via Self-Reweighting (SEAVER), which, based solely on models’ internal attention and without the need for external auxiliary information, adaptively reallocates the model’s attention weights by emphasizing the importance of condition-relevant tokens. On the C-STS-2023 test set, SEAVER consistently improves performance of all million-scale fine-tuning baseline models (up to around 3 points), and even surpasses performance of billion-scale few-shot prompted large language models (such as GPT-4). Our code is available at https://github.com/BaixuanLi/SEAVER.
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Co-authors
- Zhiqiang Gao 3
- Yong Jiang 3
- Jialong Wu 3
- Pengjun Xie 3
- Wenbiao Yin 3
- Yunlong Fan 2
- Yu-Feng Li 2
- Zhengwei Tao 2
- Wentao Zhang 2
- Ding-Chu Zhang 2
- Liwen Zhang 2
- Jingren Zhou 2
- Shihao Cai 1
- Runnan Fang 1
- Yue Fei 1
- Miao Gao 1
- Renjun Hu 1
- Fei Huang 1
- Fei Huang 1
- Guangyu Li 1
- Kuan Li 1
- Wei Lin 1
- Tianyi Ma 1
- Chuanqi Shi 1
- Xing Shi 1
- Liangcai Su 1
- Kewei Tu 1
- Xinyu Wang 1
- Xiaobin Wang 1
- Shibin Wu 1
- Xiao-Wen Yang 1
- Huifeng Yin 1
- Zhen Zhang 1
- Ningyu Zhang 1
- Xiaowen Zhang 1
- Zhongwang Zhang 1
- Yida Zhao 1
- Zhi Zhou 1