About me

I am currently a 3rd year PhD student at the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, mentored by Prof. Zhicheng Dou. I earned my bachelor’s degree (2019-2023) at Nankai University.

I’m currently a REDstar research intern focusing on foundation agent research at Xiaohongshu Inc. I have published 10+ papers in top-tier AI conferences and journals (6 first-author papers), including NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, SIGIR, and TOIS.

Research Interests：

• Foundation Agents: Developing general-purpose agentic LLMs (DeepAgent, AEPO, Tool-Star);
• Deep Research: Enhancing long-horizon reasoning with web information seeking (WebThinker, Search-o1, HiRA);
• Retrieval-Augmented LLMs: Improving large language models with knowledge retrieval (RetroLLM, CorpusLM, UniGen).

🔥 News

• 2026.01: 🎉 DeepAgent and AEPO accepted by WWW 2026. Looking forward to seeing you in Dubai!
• 2025.10: We release DeepAgent, a general reasoning agent with scalable toolsets. Check out our demo!
• 2025.10: We release AEPO, an entropy-balanced agentic RL method.
• 2025.09: 🌐 WebThinker accepted by NeurIPS 2025 and reached 1200 stars and 100 citations! It’s a powerful open-source deep research agent. Check out our demo!
• 2025.08: 🔍 Search-o1 accepted by EMNLP 2025 as Oral Presentation! It’s the first framework that performs interleaved reasoning and web-search for o1-like large reasoning models.
• 2025.05: Four papers accepted by ACL 2025! Looking forward to seeing you in Vienna!
• 2024.03: CorpusLM accepted by SIGIR 2024 as Oral Presentation! It’s a unified LLM for retrieval and question answering.

📝 Publications

As the First Author

2026

• DeepAgent: A General Reasoning Agent with Scalable Toolsets
  Xiaoxi Li, Wenxiang Jiao, Jiarui Jin, Guanting Dong, Jiajie Jin, Yinuo Wang, Hao Wang, Yutao Zhu, Ji-Rong Wen, Yuan Lu, and Zhicheng Dou.
  WWW 2026 (CCF-A)
  

2025

• WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capability
  Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Guanting Dong, Hongjin Qian, Yutao Zhu, Yongkang Wu, Ji-Rong Wen, and Zhicheng Dou.
  NeurIPS 2025 (CCF-A)
  
• Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models
  Xiaoxi Li, Guanting Dong, Jiajie Jin, Yuyao Zhang, Yujia Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Peitian Zhang, and Zhicheng Dou.
  EMNLP 2025 (CCF-B) (Oral) (Most Influential arXiv AI Papers in 2025 – Top 5/All)
  
• RetroLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Retrieve Fine-grained Evidence within Generation
  Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Yujia Zhou, Yongkang Wu, Zhonghua Li, Qi Ye, Zhicheng Dou.
  ACL 2025 (CCF-A)
  
• From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval
  Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Yujia Zhou, Yuyao Zhang, Peitian Zhang, Yutao Zhu, and Zhicheng Dou.
  TOIS 2025 (CCF-A) (JCR Q1, IF=9.1)
  

2024

• CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-intensive Tasks
  Xiaoxi Li, Zhicheng Dou, Yujia Zhou, Fangchao Liu.
  SIGIR 2024 (CCF-A) (Oral)
  
• UniGen: A Unified Generative Framework for Retrieval and Question Answering with Large Language Models
  Xiaoxi Li, Yujia Zhou, Zhicheng Dou.
  AAAI 2024 (CCF-A)
  

As a Co-author

2025

• Agentic Entropy-Balanced Policy Optimization
  Guanting Dong, Licheng Bao, Zhongyuan Wang, Kangzhi Zhao, Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Jinghan Yang, Hangyu Mao, Fuzheng Zhang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou.
  Preprint. Under review.
  
• Decoupled Planning and Execution: A Hierarchical Reasoning Framework for Deep Search
  Jiajie Jin, Xiaoxi Li, Guanting Dong, Yuyao Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Yang Zhao, Hongjin Qian, Zhicheng Dou.
  Preprint. Under review.
  
• Tool-Star: Empowering LLM-Brained Multi-Tool Reasoner via Reinforcement Learning
  Guanting Dong, Yifei Chen, Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Hongjin Qian, Yutao Zhu, Hangyu Mao, Guorui Zhou, Zhicheng Dou, and Ji-Rong Wen.
  Preprint. Under review.
  
• Hierarchical Document Refinement for Long-context Retrieval-augmented Generation
  Jiajie Jin, Xiaoxi Li, Guanting Dong, Yuyao Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Yongkang Wu, Zhonghua Li, Qi Ye, and Zhicheng Dou.
  ACL 2025 (CCF-A) (Oral)
  
• RAG-Critic: Leveraging Automated Critic-Guided Agentic Workflow for Retrieval Augmented Generation
  Guanting Dong, Jiajie Jin, Xiaoxi Li, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou, Ji-Rong Wen.
  ACL 2025 (CCF-A)
• Neuro-Symbolic Query Compiler
  Yuyao Zhang, Zhicheng Dou, Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Yongkang Wu, Zhonghua Li, Qi Ye, and Ji-Rong Wen.
  ACL 2025 (Findings)
• Descriptive and Discriminative Document Identifiers for Generative Retrieval
  Jiehan Cheng, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu, and Xiaoxi Li.
  AAAI 2025 (CCF-A)
• A Survey of Conversational Search
  Fengran Mo, Kelong Mao, Ziliang Zhao, Hongjin Qian, Haonan Chen, Yiruo Cheng, Xiaoxi Li, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou, and Jian-Yun Nie.
  TOIS 2025 (CCF-A)
  

2024

• Trustworthiness in retrieval-augmented generation systems: A survey
  Yujia Zhou, Yan Liu, Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Hongjin Qian, Zheng Liu, Chaozhuo Li, Zhicheng Dou, Tsung-Yi Ho, Philip S Yu.
  Preprint. Under review.
  

💻 Experiences

• 2025.06 - Present, REDstar Research Intern on Foundation Agents and Deep Research, Xiaohongshu Inc.

📖 Educations

• 2023.09 - Present, PhD, Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, Beijing.
• 2019.09 - 2023.06, Bachelor, College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Tianjin.