Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Yauhen Babakhin, Reza Esfandiarpoor, Oliver Holworthy, Jimmy Lin, Bo Liu
In agentic search, a document can match an agent-generated sub-query without helping answer the user's original question. Conventional rerankers score documents against the sub-query alone, overlooking the broader task and the agent's reasoning. We introduce the Agent-Context-Aware Reranker (ACARe), a compact 4B LLM trained to rerank documents using this context when available. Across multiple benchmarks and agent families, ACARe improves retrieval quality over its base reranker while reducing search effort. These benefits extend to answer generation: ACARe improves accuracy and reduces searches over no reranking, while matching or exceeding the base reranker's mean accuracy with more precise evidence. It also helps smaller agents narrow the retrieval-quality gap to larger agents, showing how better retrieval tools can make smaller agents more effective. The model, training data, and code will be released soon.
Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Lingwei Gu, Yijun Ge, Jimmy Lin
Evaluating advances in agentic search requires testing whether methods generalize across tasks and corpus scale. Changing web search services impede controlled comparisons, while small corpora assembled around benchmark questions provide a limited test of generalization. We introduce CMASS, the ClimbMix Agentic Search Suite, which projects three search benchmarks---BrowseComp-Plus, Total Recall QA, and DeepSearchQA---and the multi-hop question-answering dataset HotpotQA onto a shared, fixed corpus. The target, ClimbMix, is a pre-training corpus of 553M documents and approximately 400B tokens, assembled independently of the benchmark questions. Our projection pipeline verifies grounding, answer uniqueness, and set completeness through independent agent audits, controlled revision, and human review. The 423 questions span entity identification, multi-hop reasoning, exhaustive answer sets, and aggregation. Evaluations of three models expose substantial headroom for open-weight agents and show that high answer accuracy can coexist with incomplete evidence coverage. By enabling measurement of accuracy alongside evidence coverage, search effort, and closed-book performance, CMASS supports developing agents that find sufficient evidence and produce complete answers efficiently. The pipeline code and dataset are available at https://cmass.tech
Zijian Chen University of Waterloo, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Ping Nie, Kai Zou NetMind.AI and Protagolabs Inc, Sahel Sharifymoghaddam University of Waterloo, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green 等 21 位作者
Deep search agents that combine large language models with retrieval tools excel at complex, multi-hop queries. Yet, existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp rely on black-box web search APIs, facing key limitations. (1) Fairness: for agents, dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder reproducibility and fair comparisons across agents. (2) Disentanglement: for retrieval, the lack of a fixed document corpus makes it impossible to isolate retriever contributions from end-to-end search agent accuracy. We introduce BrowseComp-Plus, a benchmark derived from BrowseComp that employs a fixed, human-verified corpus, enabling controlled retrieval for deep search agents. BrowseComp-Plus clearly distinguishes agent performance: with a BM25 retriever, the open-source Search-R1 achieves 3.86% accuracy, while GPT-5 achieves 55.9%. Additionally, BrowseComp-Plus makes retrieval gains explicit: pairing GPT-5 with Qwen3-Embedding-8B retriever further improves accuracy to 70.1% while reducing search calls. Overall, BrowseComp-Plus provides a fair and disentangled testbed, advancing both deep search agent evaluation and retrieval research for agentic search. Code and data can be found at: https://texttron.github.io/BrowseComp-Plus/
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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
Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Ping Nie, Kai Zou, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green, Kshama Patel 等 20 位作者
Deep-Research agents, which integrate large language models (LLMs) with search tools, have shown success in improving the effectiveness of handling complex queries that require iterative search planning and reasoning over search results. Evaluations on current benchmarks like BrowseComp relies on black-box live web search APIs, have notable limitations in (1) fairness: dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder fair comparisons and reproducibility of deep research methods; (2) transparency: lack of control over the document corpus makes it difficult to isolate retriever contributions. In other words, the current evaluations may compare a complete deep research system at a given time, but they do not foster well-controlled experiments to provide insights into the capability of underlying deep research LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce BrowseComp-Plus, a benchmark derived from BrowseComp, employing a fixed, carefully curated corpus. Each query in BrowseComp-Plus includes human-verified supporting documents and mined challenging negatives, enabling controlled experimentation. The benchmark is shown to be effective in distinguishing the performance of deep research systems. For instance, the open-source model Search-R1, when paired with the BM25 retriever, achieves 3.86% accuracy, whereas the GPT-5 achieves 55.9%. Integrating the GPT-5 with the Qwen3-Embedding-8B retriever further enhances its accuracy to 70.1% with fewer search calls. This benchmark allows comprehensive evaluation and disentangled analysis of deep research agents and retrieval methods, fostering insights into retrieval effectiveness, citation accuracy, and context engineering in Deep-Research system.