arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Oct 1

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.

By Qisheng Zhou, Zhen Xiong, Qiaoyu Tan
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Boosting Deepresearch and LongContext Ability with Self-Generated Deepresearch Rollouts Traces

arXiv:2609.20844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deepresearch (DR) agents interact with real-world web environments through multi-turn search and visit, causing their contexts to grow rapidly over tim...

By Zihan Wang, Hao Wang, Boyuan Jiang, Yiqun Zhang, Shi Feng, Xiaocui Yang, Yiwen Ye, Jianghang Lin, Xiaozhong Ji, Jinghao Lin, Kai Wu
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Locate, Judge, Read: Role-Specialized Tool Agents over a Knowledge-Point Index for Open-Domain Multimodal Document QA

KnowForge is a modular pipeline for open‑domain multimodal document question answering that separates retrieval, judging, and reading into distinct agents. It uses a hybrid‑retrieval knowledge‑point index, a Locator agent for searching, a Bridge Judge to enforce a second hop, a Deep Reader that handles text, images, and tables, and a synthesizer with format checking. On the M3DocVQA benchmark it achieves an F1 of 47.5, outperforming prior systems by 11 points, and shows strong gains on MultiHop‑RAG and MMLongBench‑Doc as well.

By Wenlin Lin, Fanzhe Wei
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

HybridResearcher: Bridging the Structured-Unstructured Boundary for Deep Research Agents

arXiv:2610.24899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While LLM agents are increasingly capable of gathering and synthesizing evidence from a single homogeneous source, such as structured tables...

By Soyoung Yoon, Peiran Xu, Han Wang, Ruofan Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Feng Yan, Mohit Bansal, Debiao Li, Seung-Won Hwang, Yuxiong He, Zhewei Yao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ABAI at COLIEE 2026 Task 1: Multi-Stage Retrieval with GraphRAG-Enhanced Meta-Learning, and a Post-Hoc Study of the Cross-Validation-to-Test Gap

The paper reports the ABAI submission to COLIEE 2026 Task 1, a case law retrieval challenge that suppresses cited passages, and details a four‑stage retrieval pipeline: multi‑view BM25 with reciprocal rank fusion, neural reranking, graph‑based features via a graph attention network, and a LightGBM meta‑learner over 34 features. The best run achieved an F1 score of 0.177 on the official test set, compared to a cross‑validated 0.311, and the authors attribute the gap to a recall ceiling, temporal distribution shift, and threshold miscalibration. A controlled post‑hoc study examined the impact of threshold transfer, decision quality across time, and query similarity, and identified specific remedies—such as BM25 length‑normalisation tuning, event‑triple views, and dense fusion—that improved recall, while other interventions had no effect.

By Minhan Cho, Soyoung Park, Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Benchmarking Hybrid Deep Research Across Database Querying and Web Search

arXiv:2609.09410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While autonomous agents have made significant strides in "deep research" by iteratively navigating the open web to synthesize information, real-world p...

By Ruofan Wu, Peiran Xu, Xiaolong Li, Fan Shu, Soyoung Yoon, Yite Wang, Xiaodong Yu, Boyi Liu, Feng Yan, Debiao Li, Yuxiong He, Zhewei Yao
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Optimist Deep Research: An Iterative, State-Centric Agent for Autonomous Literature Research

Optimist Deep Research is an open‑source agent that conducts literature research as an iterative, state‑centric process. It breaks a research question into a tree of subquestions, uses search intents to query multiple scholarly databases, and merges results into a provenance‑preserving document registry. The agent iteratively expands the registry via citation snowballing, evaluates evidence, and refines the research plan through a critic that can add, split, rephrase, deprioritize, or close subquestions, ultimately producing a report with every citation linked to a retrieved document.

By Gihan Panapitiya
arXiv AI
Jul 31

SimpleWikiSearch: A Clean Offline Wikipedia Environment for Agentic Search

arXiv:2607. 26070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agentic search systems are often evaluated as if the underlying LLM were the only component that matters, yet their measured performance also depends on the surrounding search environment: the Wikipedia snapshot, preprocessing pipeline, chunking policy, retrieval backend, tool schema, observation format, and answer submission rule.

By Guanming Xiong, Penghui Zhang
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