Agentic Retrieval

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Overview

Agentic retrieval studies how AI agents find and use external information through successive search, inspection, and reasoning steps rather than relying on a single ranked result list. Common approaches combine lexical or dense search with query reformulation, document navigation, graphs or structured memory, and tools for checking evidence and deciding when to stop. The methods are tested in settings such as multi-hop question answering, deep research, long-term conversational memory, code repositories, and multimodal search, with training increasingly drawing on agent trajectories and reinforcement learning. Agents can improve evidence finding on complex tasks, but extra tool calls bring latency and cost, and better retrieval does not guarantee correct reasoning or faithful answers.

Latest papers

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96 papers13 papers in the last four weeks, up 18% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. RL-Guided Temporal Localization for Dual-Channel Retrieval in Long-Horizon Agent Memory

    Oct 16, 2026Dabin Sheng, Zhe Wu, Jinming Zhao +2Temporal IRAgentic Retrieval

    Key Laboratory of Pervasive Computing, Ministry of Education, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University · Qiyuan Lab

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

    Oct 16, 2026Gihan PanapitiyaAutonomous Research AgentsAgentic Retrieval

  3. CARA: Causally Guided Retrieval Agent for Question Answering

    Oct 15, 2026Weicheng Liu, Xiangcheng Wu, Depeng Xu +2Agentic RetrievalGraph-Based Retrieval

    University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  4. Plan or Retrieve First? A Scale Study of Tool Discovery Architectures

    Oct 13, 2026Mingfei Zhang, Amit Surana, Ziauddin Majid +2Tool Discovery for LLM AgentsLLM Tool Use

    Apple

  5. Legal-R1: Agentic Retrieval for Evidence-Based Legal Reasoning

    Oct 13, 2026Huaiwen Pang, Jiale Han, Junying Chen +2Legal QALegal Reasoning

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute · Shenzhen Shenten Digital Technology Co., Ltd.

  6. Auditing Future-Memory Use in Point-in-Time Language Agents

    Oct 13, 2026Rongtian YeLLM Agent MemoryAI Agent Auditing

    Department of Computer Science, Aalto University

  7. Tool-calling retrieval versus vector RAG for a small Greek--English knowledge base: accuracy and robustness to how users type Greek

    Oct 6, 2026Nikolaos D. Tantaroudas, Ilias Karachalios, Andrew J. McCrackenRAG RobustnessRetrieval-Augmented Generation

    Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), National Technical University of Athens, 9 Iroon Polytechniou Str., 15773 Zografou, Athens, Greece · University of Thessaly, 413 34 Larisa, Greece · DASKALOS-APPS, 183 Rue de l’Abbé Griffon, 01960, Péronnas, France

  8. T-Search: An Open Agentic Retriever and Playground for Hard Multi-Step Search

    Oct 5, 2026Olga Tsymboi, Ramil Latypov, Aleksandr Medvedev +5Multi-Hop QAAgentic Search

    T-Tech

  9. Beyond Semantic Similarity: Performance and Costs of Agentic Retrieval for Complex Tasks

    Oct 5, 2026Reza Esfandiarpoor, Radek Osmulski, Yauhen Babakhin +8Agentic RetrievalInformation Retrieval

    NVIDIA · University of Edinburgh

  10. Learning to Route in Visual Space via Multi-Step Embedding Retrieval

    Sep 30, 2026Tianyu Chen, Mingyuan Zhou, Jiaxing WuMultimodal Search AgentsAgentic Retrieval

    The University of Texas at Austin · Google DeepMind

  11. Re-ranking and Late Interaction Drive Retrieval Quality: A Controlled Comparison of RAG Strategies for Scientific Question Answering

    Sep 29, 2026Bhagyesh Rathi, Eshan Chawla, William B. AndreopoulosLate Interaction RetrievalScientific QA

    San Jose State University, Department of Computer Science

  12. PowerBench: A Benchmark for Agentic Retrieval and Reasoning in Power Systems

    Sep 28, 2026Xijing Wang, Yinsheng Yao, Jinru Ding +5LLM Agent EvaluationAI Agent Benchmarks

    Tongji University · Johns Hopkins University · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +3

  13. TableSeek: Structure-Preserving Agentic Evidence Seeking over Heterogeneous Table Corpora

    Sep 28, 2026Jiaming Tian, Liyao Li, Wentao Ye +5Agentic RetrievalTable Retrieval

    Zhejiang University · Bank of Hangzhou Co., Ltd. · Zhejiang Lab

  14. Beyond Dyadic Memory: Interaction-Aware Multimodal Memory with Adaptive Agentic Retrieval for Multi-Party Spoken Conversations

    Sep 26, 2026Wenxu Jia, Xize Cheng, Zihan Zhang +5Conversational MemoryMultimodal Memory

    Zhejiang University · Meituan

  15. The Missing Complement: State-Conditioned Minimal Sufficient Evidence for Coding Agents

    Sep 17, 2026Zhexi Feng, Ruiyi Zhang, Yongbo Yang +1AI Coding AgentsAgentic Retrieval

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093, USA

  16. TRACE: Accountable Agentic Retrieval for Source Discovery in Digital Archives

    Sep 17, 2026Donghan Bian, Marie Puren, Florian CafieroData ProvenanceAgentic Retrieval

    ENC, LRE · LRE, ENC

  17. Self-Evolving Search Index

    Sep 17, 2026Sangam Lee, Wonjae Lee, Sunghwan Kim +5Agentic RetrievalInformation Retrieval

    Yonsei University · Samsung Research · University of California, Irvine +1

  18. CITECHOICE: A Causal Audit of How Document Presentation Redistributes Citation Credit in Agentic Search

    Sep 14, 2026Sriram Selvam, Anneswa GhoshEvidence SelectionAgentic Retrieval

  19. Question's Gambit: The First Move Matters in Agentic Deep Search

    Sep 13, 2026Radin Hamidi Rad, Amin Bigdeli, Negar Arabzadeh +4Deep Research AgentsAgentic Retrieval

    University of Toronto · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · University of Waterloo +2

  20. Cartograph: Federated Tool Discovery with Operator-Attested Retrieval for AI Agents

    Sep 13, 2026Justice Owusu Agyemang, Michael Agyare, Kwame Opuni-Boachie Obour Agyekum +3LLM Tool UseAgentic Retrieval

    VIA Cybersecurity Lab, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana · Quantum and Assistive Technologies Lab, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana · Ghana Communication Technology University, Ghana

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

    Sep 8, 2026Maximilian Schall, Sedigheh Eslami, Markus Krimmel +4Agentic RetrievalMultilingual IR

    Perplexity AI

  22. RepoNav: From Snippet Retrieval to File-Centered Repository Navigation for Code Agents

    Sep 8, 2026Hongzheng Chai, Jiakun Li, Hongyue Yu +1AI Coding AgentsAgentic Retrieval

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University · School of Computer Science · 2National College for Excellent Engineers, Beihang University +2

  23. Plan Pointers and Record-Directive Form in Budgeted Verification of Inherited Agent Memory

    Sep 3, 2026Kazuki NakayashikiLLM Agent MemoryLLM Agent Verification

    Glasp

  24. CoVeR: Coverage-Based Routing of Verifier Calls in Agentic Retrieval

    Sep 3, 2026Daeyoung Roh, Donghee HanAgentic RetrievalLLM Agent Routing

    Independent Researcher · KAIST

  25. SearchWiki: Learning to Build and Navigate Knowledge Wikis for Active Information Seeking

    Aug 30, 2026Guransh Singh, Vishwajeet Kumar, Arkadeep Acharya +3Retrieval-Augmented GenerationAgentic Retrieval

    Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra · IBM

  26. You Know What I Mean: A Benchmark for Agentic Conversational Reference Grounding

    Aug 30, 2026Karen Fuchs, Uri Katz, Yoav GoldbergSoftware Engineering AgentsAgentic Retrieval

    Bar-Ilan University · Allen Institute for AI

  27. Evaluating Confidence-Gated Retrieval with Matched Trajectory Replay

    Aug 27, 2026Prateek ChhikaraAI Agent EvaluationAgentic Retrieval

    University of Southern California, USA

  28. AtlasNav: Mitigating Evidence Blindness with Persistent Corpus Navigation

    Aug 25, 2026Hongyu Guo, Zhiyu Zheng, Minghao Hu +5Inference-Time SearchAgentic Retrieval

  29. AgentWorld: Personality-Aware Reliability Evaluation for Agentic Information Retrieval

    Aug 25, 2026Gunja Agarwal, Arup Kumar Das, Arun Menon +2AI Agent EvaluationAI Agent Reliability

    PayPal

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

    Aug 24, 2026Nazib Sorathiya, Daniel Zhang, Bardiya AkhbariLLM Agent RoutingAgentic Retrieval

    Amazon AGI Seattle, WA, USA