This work introduces Sieve, a search-inspect-fetch strategy driven by a Boolean Query Language (BQL): it searches webpage fields to filter candidates, uses an interchangeable ranker to order them, presents structure-rich result cards for inspection, and fetches only selected sections.
Abstract
Existing deep-search agents use a Search-Visit workflow that retrieves whole webpages without considering the structure they expose through titles, headings, sections, and metadata. This prevents agents from directly constraining retrieval to parts of a webpage and often carries irrelevant content into their context. We introduce Sieve, a search-inspect-fetch strategy driven by a Boolean Query Language (BQL): it searches webpage fields to filter candidates, uses an interchangeable ranker to order them, presents structure-rich result cards for inspection, and fetches only selected sections. Across three QA collections, Sieve is more accurate than the strongest conventional Search-Visit configuration on each collection while using 20.7-50.6% fewer tokens. Boolean filtering improves every tested ranker, and the accuracy-context advantage persists across retriever choices and agent backbones. Our implementation is included in the SkimSearchAgent library https://github.com/ielab/skim-search-agent.
Flat retrieval-augmented generation treats a corpus as a bag of chunks, discarding document hierarchy and cross document structure. We introduce SearchWiki, a harness framework that synthesizes a corpus into a hierarchical, typed, navigable wiki and trains an agent, WikiResearcher-9B, to retrieve information through multi-turn tool use. The wiki organizes knowledge into three layers - document overviews, cross- document topic pages, and page-level source records; enabling progressive refinement of retrieval when initial lookup misses. We optimize the agent's navigation policy with on-policy reinforcement learning with a multi-component reward function balancing answer correctness, retrieval quality and trajectory efficiency. Evaluation on ViDoRe-V3 (8 domains), FinanceBench, and memory benchmarks (LoCoMo, LongMemEval, PersonaMem-v2) shows that WikiResearcher- 9B which is our RL-tuned Qwen 9B model, significantly outperforms same-size untrained baselines and exceeds or matches larger external models. SearchWiki paired with WikiResearcher-9B demonstrates that learned navigation over structured corpora is a superior alternative to flat retrieval.
Guransh Singh, Vishwajeet Kumar, Arkadeep Acharya et al.· 0 citations
A policy-aligned retrieval framework that improves offline relevance over a matched-capacity baseline, with gains broadly distributed across facet combinations, and serves this framework with a two-stage GPU architecture.
Dhritiman Das, Chujie Zheng, Ronak Kaoshik et al.· 0 citations
LLM search agents are often evaluated on final-answer accuracy, overlooking the process. Analyzing a search strategy requires understanding how credible evidence is retrieved to address question constraints. This valuable information is buried in raw search trajectories that are long and difficult to parse. We introduce SearchAtlas, a framework that converts search trajectories into structured graphs whose edges represent how evidence is propagated across the reasoning trace, from the query that retrieves it to the final answer. Our automated parsing pipeline achieves a mean edge F1 of 86.0% against human-annotated graphs and remains consistent across repeated runs. We analyze five search agents on three benchmarks, revealing systematic differences in search scale and evidence aggregation. SearchAtlas exposes fragmented answer support, question constraints that do not reach the answer, and unverified parametric knowledge entering the response. These process failures are strongly associated with incorrect answers, even more so than an LLM judge given either the raw trajectory or the ordered query list, suggesting that the constructed graphs provide useful interpretability. Moreover, an audit of cases in which process-diagnostic scores disagree with final-answer correctness shows that they capture information not reducible to answer accuracy.
Jia-Cheng Sang, Meng-Yuan Li, Sanxing Chen et al.· 0 citations
Semantic search is a core primitive of modern applications, powering recommender systems, web search, and retrieval-augmented generation for language models. The provider controls the index and query execution, leaving clients to trust that results come from the right algorithm over the intended index. A provider may truncate search to cut cost, bias results, or otherwise deviate from the specified execution undetected. Verifiability can remove this trust assumption by proving that results follow the agreed algorithm over a committed index. Realizing this efficiently is hard, as retrieval at scale relies on HNSW, a graph-based algorithm whose data-dependent traversal maps poorly onto the fixed constraint systems of zero-knowledge proofs. Prior verifiable systems therefore target regular, cluster-based indices that are easier to encode, sacrificing the recall of graph-based search. We present Atlas, a system that lets a provider prove a query was answered correctly against its committed index without revealing the index. At its core is a new zero-knowledge proof for HNSW search, built on three techniques: preprocessing that shifts all database-dependent cost offline, so per-query proving scales with the traversal rather than the database; a restructuring of HNSW into a fixed-size-state procedure that we prove returns the same result; and a timestep-tagged batching that merges the per-step arguments of the entire traversal into one. Atlas is the first to demonstrate verifiable graph-based search at scale, proving a query in under a second on the SIFT1M benchmark and in 2.0 seconds at 100 million vectors, while maintaining the recall of plaintext HNSW and revealing nothing about the index beyond the result. In a complete RAG pipeline, Atlas'proven retrieval preserves end-to-end answer quality, and reaches higher quality at lower proving cost than all prior verifiable retrieval systems.
This paper proposes HYSET, short for HYperedge-based SEt-level Tool retrieval, which forms tool retrieval as query-conditioned hyperedge prediction on a tool co-invocation hypergraph, under which the tool set itself becomes the unit of scoring and most existing retrieval paradigms reduce to restricted instances.
Xin Hong, P. Dong, Xinyang Yu et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations