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
Linxuan Du, Guangquan Xue, Xiaobo Liang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Xinyu Shi, Zhang Yijun China Mobile Communications Company Limited Research Institute, Ji Qi 等 11 位作者
Despite the potential of multi-turn self-reflection to improve LLM reasoning, its effectiveness in practice is severely constrained by a failure mode we term the Echo Trap.Specifically, this phenomenon gives rise to two coupled problems: (1) the model becomes limited by its inherent capabilities and tends to repeat earlier reflections to preserve reward signals; (2) once such “copy” behavior is reinforced, the model ceases to try new strategies, leading to exploration collapse.We attribute this issue to imprecise credit assignment during training, as standard GRPO assigns rewards at the trajectory level, making it difficult to distinguish which reflection steps contribute to improved outcomes.To address this limitation, we propose a tree-structured extension of GRPO for multi-turn self-reflection, which enables more accurate advantage estimation.Through extensive experiments, we analyze the Echo Trap and demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates behavior collapse and improves performance across multiple benchmarks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xinyu Shi, Kairong Luo Tsinghua University, Zhen Zheng ByteDance Inc., Wenguang Chen Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced in recent years, scaling up in both parameter count and context length. However, as context windows extend from thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, attention computation becomes the dominant source of memory usage and runtime in decoding stages, severely limiting the efficiency and scalability of long-context LLMs. Sparse attention has emerged as a promising solution, reducing complexity by computing attention over only a subset of context tokens. However, the sparse attention for Multi-head Latent Attention(MLA) which is a variant of standard MHA is rarely studied. In this paper, we introduce RoPE-based Blockwise Sparse Attention (RoBSA), a method designed specifically for MLA during the decoding stage of model inference. RoBSA leverages the decoupled nature of RoPE within MLA to implement token selection in a blockwise manner. RoBSA is a lightweight, training-free, and layer-aware algorithm that can be integrated in a plug-and-play fashion. Our method significantly reduces end-to-end inference latency in the decoding stage by up to 2.55x with minimal accuracy loss compared to full attention in long-context scenarios for very large models.
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cs.CL
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.