Organizations: Meta · Northeastern University, China · University of Oslo · Bosch Center for AI · University of Stuttgart · University of Cambridge · Mina AI · Amazon
Deep research requires reasoning over web evidence to answer open-ended questions, and it is a core capability for AI agents. Yet many deep research agents still rely on implicit, unstructured search behavior that causes redundant exploration and brittle evidence aggregation. Motivated by Anthropic's "think" tool paradigm and insights from the information-retrieval literature, we introduce Q+, a set of query and evidence processing tools that make web search more deliberate by guiding query planning, monitoring search progress, and extracting evidence from long web snapshots. We integrate Q+ into the browser sub-agent of Eigent, an open-source, production-ready multi-agent workforce for computer use, yielding EigentSearch-Q+. Across four benchmarks (SimpleQA-Verified, FRAMES, WebWalkerQA, and XBench DeepSearch), Q+ improves Eigent's browser agent benchmark-size-weighted average accuracy by 3.0, 3.8, and 0.6 percentage points (pp) for GPT-4.1, GPT-5.1, and Minimax M2.5 model backends, respectively. Case studies further suggest that EigentSearch-Q+ produces more coherent tool-calling trajectories by making search progress and evidence handling explicit.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. System architecture of the Eigent multi-agent framework and the EigentSearch-Q+ enhancement. (a) High-level architectural overview of Eigent . (b) Detailed schematic of the Browser Agent, and added Q+ tools. System architecture diagram showing (a) the high-level \eigentmulti-agent framework and (b) the Browser Agent with additional \qplustools for query processing, targeted extraction, and research progress reflection.
Figure 2. Performance analysis of agent configurations across four LLM backends. Accuracy results for GPT-4.1 mini (a), GPT-4.1 (b), GPT-5.1 (c), and Minimax M2.5 (d) across four datasets. The Q+ framework is evaluated against Direct Generation (Baseline), Search Only, and Eigent browser agent. A four-panel benchmark figure comparing accuracy across four datasets for GPT-4.1 mini, GPT-4.1, GPT-5.1, and Minimax M2.5. In most panels, \qplusoutperforms the baseline, Search Only, and the standard \eigentbrowser agent, with the largest gains on stronger GPT backends.
SimpleQA-Verified
FRAMES
WebWalkerQA
XBench
Weighted Avg.
GPT-4.1 mini
0.8
-0.8
-0.6
4.0
0.1
GPT-4.1
2.3
0.6
5.6
12.0
3.0
GPT-5.1
1.5
5.7
4.4
8.0
3.8
Minimax M2.5
0.8
1.3
-1.5
7.0
0.6
Table 1. Accuracy improvements of EigentSearch-Q+ over the Eigent browser agent. All values are reported in percentage points (pp) and represent the accuracy change of Q+ relative to Eigent (negative values indicate decreases). The weighted average summarizes the overall performance gain across all evaluated benchmarks.
Deep research agents have achieved remarkable progress on complex information seeking tasks. Even long ReAct style rollouts explore only a single trajectory, while recent state of the art systems scale inference time compute via parallel search and aggregation. Yet deep research answers are composed of complementary pieces of evidence, which parallel rollouts often duplicate rather than complete, yielding diminishing returns while pushing the aggregation context toward the model's limit. We propose Argus, an agentic system in which a Searcher and a Navigator cooperate to treat deep research as assembling a jigsaw from complementary evidence pieces, rather than brute forcing the whole answer in parallel. The Searcher collects evidence traces for a given sub-query through ReAct-style interaction. The Navigator maintains a shared evidence graph, verifying which pieces are still missing, dispatching Searchers to gather them, and reasoning over the completed graph to produce a source-traced final answer. We train the Navigator with reinforcement learning to verify, dispatch, and synthesize, while independently training the Searcher to remain a standard ReAct agent. The resulting Navigator supports rollouts with a single Searcher or many in parallel without retraining. With both Searcher and Navigator built on a 35B-A3B MoE backbone, Argus gains 5.5 points with a single Searcher and 12.7 points with 8 parallel Searchers, averaged over eight benchmarks. With 64 Searchers it reaches 86.2 on BrowseComp, surpassing every proprietary agent we benchmark, while the Navigator's reasoning context stays under 21.5K tokens.
Deep research agents answer complex questions through iterative loops of searching, reading, and reasoning. Recent work on reasoning-intensive benchmarks such as BrowseComp-Plus shows that well-configured lexical retrieval can surface high-quality evidence, yet agents may still fail to connect documents carrying evidence to the gold documents. We identify a deep research agent's first retrieval move as an important design decision for this setting. We introduce Question's Gambit, a first-move retrieval module that decomposes the question into a set of clues, reformulates them into complementary searches, consolidates the retrieved results, and reranks the candidate pool before the agent begins its iterative search-and-reasoning process. This produces an opening context designed to support both clue aggregation and final-answer verification. We further evaluate on MultiHop-RAG to test whether these benefits transfer beyond BrowseComp-Plus to a more conventional multi-hop question structure. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus show that Question's Gambit improves retrieval recall and downstream agent accuracy over strong baselines, improving answer accuracy from 83.1% to 90.5% with gpt-5.5 over Pi-Serini, the strongest reported agentic baseline. Our results confirm that effective agentic deep research depends not only on the tools available inside the loop, but also on the quality of the first move. We published our implementation publicly at https://github.com/radinhamidi/Question-s-Gambit.
Deep Research agents are rapidly emerging as primary consumers of modern retrieval systems. Unlike human users who issue and refine queries without documenting their intermediate thought processes, Deep Research agents generate explicit natural language reasoning before each search call, revealing rich intent and contextual information that existing retrievers entirely ignore. To exploit this overlooked signal, we introduce: (1) Reasoning-Aware Retrieval, a retrieval paradigm that jointly embeds the agent's reasoning trace alongside its query; and (2) DR-Synth, a data synthesis method that generates Deep Research retriever training data from standard QA datasets. We demonstrate that both components are independently effective, and their combination yields a trained embedding model, AgentIR-4B, with substantial gains. On the challenging BrowseComp-Plus benchmark, AgentIR-4B achieves 68% accuracy with the open-weight agent Tongyi-DeepResearch, compared to 50% with conventional embedding models twice its size, and 37% with BM25. Code and data are available at: https://texttron.github.io/AgentIR/.
Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang +3
University of Waterloo · University of Queensland · Carnegie Mellon University