The paper reviews and categorizes large language models that combine step‑by‑step reasoning with interactive search, treating retrieval as an action within an iterative agentic loop. It analyzes these systems along four architectural axes—retrieval coupling, controller design, knowledge source, and grounding strictness—while also considering the learning signal as a cross‑cutting factor. The authors conduct controlled ablations and benchmark analyses to clarify how design choices affect search, stopping, and grounding behavior, aiming to provide a unified perspective for future research.
By Biswas Poudel, Nilson Chapagain, Amit Kumar, Xianshun Jiang
arXiv:2608. 06128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search agents extend large language models beyond static parametric memory by enabling them to acquire and use ex ternal evidence during multi-step reasoning.
By Xingyu Guo, Wei Chen, Linlin Yang, Baochang Zhang
arXiv:2607. 00341v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models achieve strong performance on many reasoning tasks when allowed to externalize intermediate steps as Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
By Hengyu Fu, Tianyu Guo, Zixuan Wang, Hanlin Zhu, Jason D. Lee, Jiantao Jiao, Stuart Russell, Song Mei
arXiv:2608. 05124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long context reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is usually constrained by the fact that a single inference trajectory has to simultaneously explore the context, store intermediate state, verify evidence, and produce the final answer.
By Purbesh Mitra, Sennur Ulukus
A new framework called APT‑RAG is introduced for evidence‑intensive question answering. It uses adaptive planning to expand a tree‑based reasoning structure according to question dependencies and evidence needs, and employs topology‑aware evidence gathering that reuses sibling evidence, retrieves directly, and aggregates evidence from child nodes. The approach also includes evidence‑guided batched answer generation to reduce generation overhead, and experimental results show it outperforms existing structured RAG methods on evidence‑intensive QA benchmarks.
By Songeun Lee, Kyungjin Min, Injae Na, Suyeong Lee, Chiyoung Kim, Woohwan Jung
AgenticRag‑R1 is a reinforcement‑learning framework that integrates reasoning, retrieval, and memory through a stack and fine‑grained action space. It uses hierarchical action‑aware rewards and an information‑aware trajectory rejection strategy to support long‑horizon learning. Experiments on multi‑hop, open‑domain, and agentic reasoning benchmarks show that AgenticRag‑R1 outperforms strong baselines and produces robust, interpretable, memory‑aware reasoning behaviors.
By Xinke Jiang, Yue Fang, Zhibang Yang, Jiaran Gao, Zhixin Zhang, Tao Feng, Rihong Qiu, Wentao Zhang, Hongxin Ding, Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Yuheng Huang, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
arXiv:2505. 15062v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge extrapolation is the process of inferring novel information by combining and extending existing knowledge that is explicitly available.
By Jiashu He, Jinxuan Fan, Bowen Jiang, Ignacio Houine, Dan Roth, Alejandro Ribeiro
arXiv:2604. 09482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains remains challenging as intermediate steps are often not locally verifiable: unlike math or code, evaluating step correctness may require synthesizing clues across large external knowledge sources.
By Jiwoong Sohn, Tomasz Sternal, Kenneth Styppa, Torsten Hoefler, Michael Moor
arXiv:2607. 10562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the multi-hop reasoning capabilities of large language models remains a significant challenge.
By JungMin Yun, JuneHyoung Kwon, YoungBin Kim
The paper investigates whether different forms of intermediate computation in large language models—such as token-based traces, pause tokens, and latent reasoning—rely on the same underlying mechanism. By training five variants of GPTNeoX on an extended multi-hop reasoning task, the authors find that while vanilla, Chain-of-Thought, and Pause Token models perform well on in-distribution data, they fail to generalize to longer-hop out-of-distribution problems. In contrast, latent-reasoning models exhibit better depth generalization, with causal analysis revealing a sparse recurrent search circuit that implements forward reachability propagation across the graph.
arXiv:2607. 02509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts has become a key requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) in realistic applications.
By Yanjun Zhao, Ruizhong Qiu, Tianxin Wei, Yuanchen Bei, Zhining Liu, Lingjie Chen, Ismini Lourentzou, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He
arXiv:2608.22479v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables LLMs to access external knowledge for answering knowledge-intensive questions. For complex multi-hop quest...
By Jun Chen, Yongchao Liu, Pengyu Qiu, Jiajun Zheng, Juelu Zhang, Yujie Zeng, Qin Zhang, Ziyue Qiao, Xiao Luo