WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models
Rui Wang, Ce Zhang Carnegie Mellon University, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang Tencent AI Lab 等 13 位作者
原文摘要
The hallmark of Deep Research agents lies in compositional reasoning, the capacity to aggregate distributed, heterogeneous information into coherent logical insights. However, current agentic systems are often retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light, where success is predominantly determined by simple entity-seeking rather than the multi-step aggregation of scattered evidence. To address this, we propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator, designed to shift the agentic paradigm from retrieval-centric to compositional aggregation. Our approach first employs Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge, then Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions using over 12 composition guidelines derived from a rigorous deconstruction of the Deep Research problem setting. Fine-tuning on this corpus fundamentally transforms agent behavior, fostering deliberate composition reasoning and reduced tool redundancy. The resulting WebAggregator-32B surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. To address the lack of benchmarks that emphasize both reasoning and retrieval, we introduce the WebAggregatorQA testbed, which reveals that even with perfect retrieval, top-tier models still underperformed. These results demonstrate that compositional reasoning, not retrieval, is the true performance ceiling for next-generation research agents.
cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表