The paper introduces Retrieval-Grounded Voting (RGV), a new test-time scaling method for multi-turn search agents that retrieves and conditions on external documents. It identifies that confidence-based voting fails in this setting due to copy inflation, where tokens copied from retrieved documents inflate log probabilities and flatten confidence scores. RGV scores each rollout by lexical overlap between the final answer and retrieved documents, avoiding contaminated context and additional LLM calls, and achieves consistent accuracy gains across multiple benchmarks and models.
arXiv:2610.08452v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a widely used approach for grounding large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge. However, configuring...
The paper introduces Continual Search, an iterative framework that guides large language models to persistently search for diagnostic evidence in long AI agent execution logs, addressing the limitations of one-shot judgments. Evaluated on four existing RCA benchmarks and a new large-scale dataset called MegaRCA-Mix, Continual Search consistently boosts attribution performance, achieving a 40% F1 improvement for GPT‑5.5 on MegaRCA‑Mix. The results show that effective search can outweigh raw model scale, enabling lower-tier models to outperform higher-tier ones in root‑cause attribution tasks.
arXiv:2608.30303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search agents reduce hallucination by grounding answers in retrieved web evidence. Yet reliance on retrieval also creates an attack surface: poisoned c...
arXiv:2609.14412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents answer complex questions through iterative loops of searching, reading, and reasoning. Recent work on reasoning-intensive benchmar...
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can improve factual grounding without guaranteeing that every generated claim is supported. Previous work has studied claim-level conformal factuality in single-st...
arXiv:2606.00660v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic search requires language model agents to explore many sources and answer complex information-seeking questions. Scaling test-time compute i...
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:2606. 12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead.
DualStake introduces a dual-path confidence calibration for deep research agents, adding step confidence elicitation after each retrieval step. The method shows that evidence confidence (E-Conf) after the final retrieval provides a stronger uncertainty signal than answer confidence (A-Conf), and that A-Conf is largely influenced by E-Conf. By applying margin‑clipped, confidence‑dependent stake rewards, DualStake aligns both E-Conf and A-Conf with answer correctness, improving calibration across multiple QA benchmarks without harming accuracy.
Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation. We investigate whether verbalized confidence from black-box language models can serve as an actionable signal for retrieval routing.
arXiv:2602. 12276v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time scaling has become a standard way to improve performance and boost reliability of neural network models.