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The paper introduces SEEDS, a preview-guided evidence admission framework that allows search agents to selectively admit retrieved documents into their reasoning process. SEEDS exposes lightweight previews of candidates and lets the agent decide which and how many to fully inspect based on its current reasoning state, enabling arbitrary subset selection rather than fixed or rank-based policies. Experiments on nine knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks show that SEEDS improves search effectiveness and reduces full-evidence consumption compared to traditional retrieval prefixes.
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.
arXiv:2607. 28229v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The web is increasingly accessed by AI agents rather than humans.
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...
The paper introduces decision checkpoints that log observations and tool actions during inference, enabling the assignment of outcome categories to scientific-search agent responses. Using these checkpoints on 540 AutoResearchBench questions, the authors compare keyword search and read-first strategies, finding that keyword search yields 24.6% accuracy while raw search achieves 17.8%. The checkpoint protocol reveals detailed differences in target exposure, inspection attempts, and evidence-search calls that aggregate accuracy alone obscures.
QREF is a plug‑and‑play system that improves DeepSearch agents by refining search queries to match the current reasoning intent and filtering evidence to keep only what is relevant. The Query Refiner rewrites queries for complementary coverage across each search batch, while the Evidence Filter removes distracting retrieval results. Experiments show that QREF boosts DeepSearch performance on four benchmarks, achieving significant Pass@1 gains and dramatically reducing ineffective query batches without changing the agents’ architectures or retraining their reasoning policies.