arXiv AI

TRACE: Trajectory Selection for Parallel Scaling of Search Agents

TRACE is a lightweight learned selector that ranks completed search trajectories by aggregating cross‑rollout evidence, preserving individual query and evidence occurrences while propagating information across shared content or document identity. Trained with answer‑level supervision over frozen text embeddings, TRACE selects an existing answer without additional search or autoregressive aggregation, and a single selector generalizes across rollout policies and agent backbones. Across six WebQA policies, six long‑horizon dataset‑backbone combinations, and multiple WebQA benchmarks, TRACE outperforms majority voting and generative aggregators, achieving higher accuracy and at least tenfold higher processing throughput.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

Iris: Climbing to the Search Frontier

The paper introduces Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two search agents trained at 35B and 397B parameter scales. They use a novel data pipeline that constructs reverse‑engineered multi‑hop queries from web hyperlinks, filters trajectories, and alternates supervised fine‑tuning with reinforcement learning in a process called SFT‑RL climbing. Evaluations on several benchmarks show that, with inference‑time context management, the agents achieve the best open‑source results in their parameter ranges.

By Ziyuan Liu, Hengqi Liu, Zichuan Wang, Yang Qin, Jiachen Liang, Xu Chu, Shaowei Chen, Yuantao Gu, Mu Chuan
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Enrich-Retrieve-Rank: Scaling Capability Discovery Beyond In-Context Routing

The paper introduces Enrich‑Retrieve‑Rank, a scalable method for discovering capabilities in large agent ecosystems. It replaces in‑context routing with an offline enrichment step that converts sparse metadata into searchable profiles, followed by an online retrieve‑then‑rank pipeline that returns a ranked shortlist without invoking candidates. Experiments show that as the number of capabilities grows from 10 to 7,278, the new approach maintains higher top‑1 accuracy and reduces cost by 70× compared to full‑context baselines.

By Nazib Sorathiya, Daniel Zhang, Bardiya Akhbari
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Q2D-Web: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Retrieval in Agentic RAG Systems

Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Clarify-Then-Search: A Clarification Benchmark for Deep Search with End-to-End Nugget Restoration

Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.

By Deqiang Huang, Jingbo Zhou, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Hua Wu, Enhong Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Pairwise Ranking Outperforms Single-Action RL for Offline Explanation Selection: A Practical Lesson

The paper presents a cost‑effective approach for industrial explainable‑recommendation systems by decoupling explanation generation from selection. Explanations are pre‑generated using six prompt styles and two commodity LLMs, then a lightweight CPU‑resident selector (e.g., LambdaRank) chooses the best one at request time, achieving sub‑100 ms latency without GPUs. Experiments on a 2,958‑pair Google Local subset and a 300‑pair MovieLens‑1M split show that pairwise ranking outperforms single‑action RL methods, while KG‑path selectors achieve near‑perfect unique‑output rates, and the overall end‑to‑end build cost is around $15 on commodity hardware.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

OpenResearcher: A Fully Open Pipeline for Long-Horizon Deep Research Trajectory Synthesis

OpenResearcher is a fully open, reproducible pipeline for generating long‑horizon deep research trajectories that interleave search, evidence aggregation, and multi‑step reasoning. It decouples corpus bootstrapping from trajectory synthesis and runs the search‑and‑browse loop offline using three browser primitives over a 15M‑document corpus. Using GPT‑OSS‑120B as a teacher, the pipeline produced over 97K trajectories, enabling a 30B‑A3B model to achieve 54.8% accuracy on BrowseComp‑Plus and providing insights into pipeline design through controlled analysis.

By Zhuofeng Li, Dongfu Jiang, Xueguang Ma, Haoxiang Zhang, Ping Nie, Yuyu Zhang, Kai Zou, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang, Wenhu Chen