English

XPath Agent: An Efficient XPath Programming Agent Based on LLM for Web Crawler

Information Retrieval 2025-02-25 v1 Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering

Abstract

We present XPath Agent, a production-ready XPath programming agent specifically designed for web crawling and web GUI testing. A key feature of XPath Agent is its ability to automatically generate XPath queries from a set of sampled web pages using a single natural language query. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we benchmark XPath Agent against a state-of-the-art XPath programming agent across a range of web crawling tasks. Our results show that XPath Agent achieves comparable performance metrics while significantly reducing token usage and improving clock-time efficiency. The well-designed two-stage pipeline allows for seamless integration into existing web crawling or web GUI testing workflows, thereby saving time and effort in manual XPath query development. The source code for XPath Agent is available at https://github.com/eavae/feilian.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.15688,
  title  = {XPath Agent: An Efficient XPath Programming Agent Based on LLM for Web Crawler},
  author = {Yu Li and Bryce Wang and Xinyu Luan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15688},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:53:08.497Z