Zekun Xi

Also published as: ZeKun Xi


2025

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WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal
Jialong Wu | Wenbiao Yin | Yong Jiang | Zhenglin Wang | Zekun Xi | Runnan Fang | Linhai Zhang | Yulan He | Deyu Zhou | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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 this, 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 this horizontal and vertical integration in real-world scenarios.

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SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement
Runnan Fang | Xiaobin Wang | Yuan Liang | Shuofei Qiao | Jialong Wu | Zekun Xi | Ningyu Zhang | Yong Jiang | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

In the interaction between agents and their environments, agents expand their capabilities by planning and executing actions. However, LLM-based agents face substantial challenges when deployed in novel environments or required to navigate unconventional action spaces. To empower agents to autonomously explore environments, optimize workflows, and enhance their understanding of actions, we propose SynWorld, a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) exploration to effectively refine their action knowledge in the current environment. Our experiments demonstrate that SynWorld is an effective and general approach to learning action knowledge in new environments.

2024

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Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing
Mengru Wang | Ningyu Zhang | Ziwen Xu | Zekun Xi | Shumin Deng | Yunzhi Yao | Qishen Zhang | Linyi Yang | Jindong Wang | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

This paper investigates using knowledge editing techniques to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs). We construct a benchmark, SafeEdit, which covers nine unsafe categories with various powerful attack prompts and equips comprehensive metrics for systematic evaluation. We conduct experiments with several knowledge editing approaches, indicating that knowledge editing has the potential to efficiently detoxify LLMs with limited impact on general performance. Then, we propose a simple yet effective baseline, dubbed Detoxifying with Intraoperative Neural Monitoring (DINM), to diminish the toxicity of LLMs within a few tuning steps via only one instance. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the internal mechanism for various detoxifying approaches, demonstrating that previous methods like SFT and DPO may merely suppress the activations of toxic parameters, while DINM mitigates the toxicity of the toxic parameters to a certain extent, making permanent adjustments. We hope that these insights could shed light on future work of developing detoxifying approaches and the underlying knowledge mechanisms of LLMs.

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EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models
Peng Wang | Ningyu Zhang | Bozhong Tian | Zekun Xi | Yunzhi Yao | Ziwen Xu | Mengru Wang | Shengyu Mao | Xiaohan Wang | Siyuan Cheng | Kangwei Liu | Yuansheng Ni | Guozhou Zheng | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

Large Language Models (LLMs) usually suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. To this end, many knowledge editing approaches for LLMs have emerged – aiming to subtly inject/edit updated knowledge or adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. Nevertheless, due to significant differences among various knowledge editing methods and the variations in task setups, there is no standard implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from applying knowledge editing to applications. To address these issues, we propose EasyEdit, an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for LLMs. It supports various cutting-edge knowledge editing approaches and can be readily applied to many well-known LLMs such as T5, GPT-J, LlaMA, etc. Empirically, we report the knowledge editing results on LlaMA-2 with EasyEdit, demonstrating that knowledge editing surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. We have released the source code on GitHub, along with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documentation for beginners to get started. Besides, we present an online system for real-time knowledge editing, and a demo video.

2023

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LambdaKG: A Library for Pre-trained Language Model-Based Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Xin Xie | Zhoubo Li | Xiaohan Wang | ZeKun Xi | Ningyu Zhang
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations