Agentic Search

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Latest papers 98

17 papers in the last four weeks, up 21% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Masking Stale Observations Helps Search Agents -- Until It Doesn't: A Regime Map and Its Mechanism
May 29, 2026Haoxiang Zhang, Qixin Xu, Zhuofeng Li +4Agentic Search Agentic Retrieval
1UC San Diego · 2UC Berkeley · 3Texas A&M University +1
SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search
May 28, 2026Yunbo Tang, Chengyi Yang, Shiyu Liu +4Agentic Search RL for LLM Agents
School of Informatics, Xiamen University · School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University
Beyond Trajectory Rewards: Step-level Credit Assignment for Agentic Search via Graph Modeling
May 28, 2026Yuchen Liu, Yingjie Feng, Lixiong Qin +5Reward Modeling Agentic RL
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Li Auto Inc.
GrepSeek: Training Search Agents for Direct Corpus Interaction
May 28, 2026Alireza Salemi, Chang Zeng, Atharva Nijasure +4Tool-Augmented Language Model Agents Agentic Search
University of Massachusetts Amherst · Princeton University · Carnegie Mellon University
VibeSearchBench: Benchmarking Long-horizon Proactive Search in the Wild
May 27, 2026Xiaohongshu IncAgentic Search Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation
Xiaohongshu Dots Studio & Unipat AI
Maat: The Agentic Legal Research Assistant for Competition Protection
May 26, 2026Basant Mounir, Farida Madkour, Amira Abdelaziz +1Legal IR Agentic Search
Cairo, Egypt
Can LLMs Time Travel? Enhancing Temporal Consistency in Legal Agentic Search through Reinforcement Learning
May 25, 2026Wei Fan, Yining Zhou, Mufan Zhang +8Agentic Search Legal QA
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST, Hong Kong SAR, China · Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada · School of Law, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
SVFSearch: A Multimodal Knowledge-Intensive Benchmark for Short-Video Frame Search in the Gaming Vertical Domain
May 18, 2026Lingtao Mao, Huangyu Dai, Xinyu Sun +4Multimodal IR Agentic Search
Kuaishou Technology Beijing, China
Argus: Evidence Assembly for Scalable Deep Research Agents
May 15, 2026Zhen Zhang, Liangcai Su, Zhuo Chen +7Multi-Agent LLM Systems Tool-Augmented Language Model Agents
MiroMind AI
Is Grep All You Need? How Agent Harnesses Reshape Agentic Search
May 14, 2026Sahil Sen, Akhil Kasturi, Elias Lumer +2Agentic Search LLM Agent Evaluation
PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S.
EcoGEO: Trajectory-Aware Evidence Ecosystems for Web-Enabled LLM Search Agents
May 13, 2026Hengwei Ye, Jiasheng Mao, Zhenhan Guan +1Generative Engine Optimization Agentic Search
ShanghaiTech University
Rethinking Agentic Search with Pi-Serini: Is Lexical Retrieval Sufficient?
May 11, 2026Tz-Huan Hsu, Jheng-Hong Yang, Jimmy LinTool-Augmented Language Model Agents Agentic Search
University of Waterloo · Stencilzeit
SearchSkill: Teaching LLMs to Use Search Tools with Evolving Skill Banks
May 9, 2026Jinchao Hu, Meizhi Zhong, Kehai Chen +1Tool-Augmented Language Model Agents Agentic Search
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Independent Researcher Shenzhen / Beijing, China
The Context Gathering Decision Process: A POMDP Framework for Agentic Search
May 7, 2026Chinmaya Kausik, Adith Swaminathan, Nathan KallusAgentic Search LLM Agents
University of Michigan · Netflix
AgenticRAG: Agentic Retrieval for Enterprise Knowledge Bases
May 7, 2026Susheel Suresh, Hazel Mak, Shangpo Chou +2Tool-Augmented Language Model Agents Agentic Search
Microsoft Corporation
Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems
May 5, 2026Yilun Zhao, Jinbiao Wei, Tingyu Song +3Agentic Search Synthetic Data Generation
Yale NLP Lab · National University of Singapore · NYU Shanghai
A Compound AI Agent for Conversational Grant Discovery
May 4, 2026Zhisheng Tang, Mayank KejriwalAgentic Search Web Search Agents
University of Southern California & GRAIL
Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction
May 3, 2026Zhuofeng Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Cong Wei +16Agentic Search IR Evaluation
Texas A&M University · University of Waterloo · UC San Diego +6
Web2BigTable: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent LLM System for Internet-Scale Information Search and Extraction
Apr 29, 2026Yuxuan Huang, Yihang Chen, Zhiyuan He +6Multi-Agent LLM Systems Agentic Search
University of Liverpool · University College London · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab
AgentSearchBench: A Benchmark for AI Agent Search in the Wild
Apr 24, 2026Bin Wu, Arastun Mammadli, Xiaoyu Zhang +1Agentic Search AI Agent Evaluation
Centre for Artificial Intelligence, University College London
CoSearch: Joint Training of Reasoning and Document Ranking via Reinforcement Learning for Agentic Search
Apr 19, 2026Hansi Zeng, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar +2Reinforcement Learning Learning to Rank
Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, University of Massachusetts Amherst · Snap Inc.
SeekerGym: A Benchmark for Reliable Information Seeking
Apr 18, 2026Remy Kim, Minseung Lee, Shuo Li +1AI Agent Reliability Agentic Search
University of Pennsylvania, Curation Labs · Curation Labs · Google DeepMind +1
QuarkMedSearch: A Long-Horizon Deep Search Agent for Exploring Medical Intelligence
Apr 14, 2026Zhichao Lin, Zhichao Liang, Gaoqiang Liu +6Agentic Search LLM Agent Training
Qwen Applications Business Group, Alibaba · Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Beyond Stochastic Exploration: What Makes Training Data Valuable for Agentic Search
Apr 9, 2026Chuzhan Hao, Wenfeng Feng, Guochao Jiang +3Agentic Search RL for Language Model Reasoning
Alibaba Cloud Computing
EigentSearch-Q+: Enhancing Deep Research Agents with Structured Reasoning Tools
Apr 9, 2026Boer Zhang, Mingyan Wu, Dongzhuoran Zhou +6Deep Research Agents Agentic Search
Meta · Northeastern University, China · University of Oslo +5
Search, Do not Guess: Teaching Small Language Models to Be Effective Search Agents
Apr 6, 2026Yizhou Liu, Qi Sun, Yulin Chen +2Agentic Search Small Language Models
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · New York University · Nanyang Technological University
OASES: Outcome-Aligned Search-Evaluation Co-Training for Agentic Search
Apr 4, 2026Erhan Zhang, Yiqun Chen, Zechun Niu +6Agentic Search Process Reward Models
Renmin University of China · University of Southern California · Xiaohongshu Inc.
Do We Still Need GraphRAG? Benchmarking RAG and GraphRAG for Agentic Search Systems
Apr 1, 2026Dongzhe Fan, Zheyi Xue, Siyuan Liu +1Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG Evaluation
New York University Shanghai, Shanghai, China
CogSearch: A Cognitive-Aligned Multi-Agent Framework for Proactive Decision Support in E-Commerce Search
Mar 12, 2026Zhouwei Zhai, Mengxiang Chen, Haoyun Xia +3E-Commerce Search Agentic Search
JD.com, Beijing, China
Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Self-Reflection for Agentic Search
Mar 11, 2026Teng Xiao, Yige Yuan, Hamish Ivison +6Reinforcement Learning Agentic Search
Allen Institute for AI · University of Washington · Independent

May 29, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Masking Stale Observations Helps Search Agents -- Until It Doesn't: A Regime Map and Its Mechanism

Haoxiang Zhang, Qixin Xu, Zhuofeng Li, Lei Zhang+3

1UC San Diego · 2UC Berkeley · 3Texas A&M University+1

Agentic Search Agentic Retrieval LLM Context Management

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Long-horizon search agents accumulate large amounts of retrieved content across many tool calls, making context-budget efficiency increasingly important. A minimal intervention is to mask stale observations from the context as the trajectory progresses, but it remains unclear when this form of context management helps and why. We study observation masking through a systematic sweep over various agent backbones (4B to 284B parameters) and three retrievers on offline and live-web agentic search benchmarks. We find that the accuracy gain from masking follows an asymmetric inverted-U shape when plotted against the model's accuracy without context management: a plateau under weak retrievers, a peak when a strong retriever meets a mid-capacity model, and a sharp collapse when the model is saturated. This pattern reflects the interaction between retriever recall and the model's implicit filtering capacity, rather than either factor in isolation. Mechanistically, masking implements a token-for-turn trade-off: it removes observations the model has largely stopped attending to and pages the agent rarely re-opens. The added turns help when they convert failures into successes, but they fail when masking removes evidence the model would otherwise have used. We therefore reframe context management as a regime-dependent intervention and provide a holistic perspective for analyzing context use in agentic deep search. We release our scaffold and trajectories here (https://github.com/i-DeepSearch/observation-masking) to support future research.