Deep Research Pretraining (DRP), an offline framework that derives predictive navigation supervision from naturally occurring evidence structures, is introduced, an offline framework that derives predictive navigation supervision from naturally occurring evidence structures.
Abstract
Deep research agents are often trained on expensive, environment-grounded tool-use trajectories that require repeated retrieval, document inspection, and report evaluation. We introduce Deep Research Pretraining (DRP), an offline framework that derives predictive navigation supervision from naturally occurring evidence structures. Given a citation-bearing or hyperlinked passage, DRP constructs a proxy research objective, recovers linked evidence and graph-related alternatives, and converts them into search-open-write trajectories. This teaches models what to search for, which documents to inspect, and how to synthesize evidence, without a live retrieval environment or executed policy rollout. We instantiate DRP on scholarly citation graphs (DRP-Paper) and Wikipedia hyperlinks (DRP-Web), continually pretrain separate Qwen3-14B-Base models on 1B tokens, and fine-tune them on controlled fractions of 13K agent trajectories. Across five independently sampled subsets at each low-data budget, both variants consistently outperform matched no-DRP models on DeepResearch Bench. With one quarter of the SFT data, DRP-Web even surpasses a fixed no-DRP full-data checkpoint, with gains transferring to ResearchQA, WebWalkerQA, and SimpleQA. Starting from matched low-data SFT checkpoints, the DRP-Web advantage also persists through subsequent agentic RL. Source-matched and evidence-mismatch controls indicate that these improvements arise from evidence-conditioned navigation rather than domain exposure or agent-format imitation. DRP thus provides a promising complementary approach to trajectory-based agent training.
LiteSearch-VL is a low-compute recipe for Qwen3-VL-2B and Qwen3-VL-4B that uses only released OpenSearch-VL trajectories, parameter-efficient LoRA adapters, and synthetic step-level preferences, identifying answer verification, not search depth, as the next bottleneck for small multimodal agents.
Saeed Khaki, Nima Safaei, Kamal Ginotra· 0 citations
SearchWiki paired with WikiResearcher-9B demonstrates that learned navigation over structured corpora is a superior alternative to flat retrieval, and optimizing the agent's navigation policy with on-policy reinforcement learning with a multi-component reward function balancing answer correctness, retrieval quality and trajectory efficiency.
Guransh Singh, Vishwajeet Kumar, Arkadeep Acharya et al.· 0 citations
Agentic retrieval workflows produce query, retrieval, and stopping traces as a byproduct of answering questions. We study how these traces can adapt a deployed dense retriever to changing workflow distributions without new relevance labels, synthetic queries, or LLM judgments. We introduce Navigation-Informed Embeddings (NIE), a family of trace-derived objectives. NIE-Stop turns the stopping document into a soft positive; NIE-Path additionally uses preceding path documents as hard comparisons and imposes ordinal constraints with geometric decay. A BGE encoder adapted from retained source trajectories improves support Recall@20 on an independent target benchmark from 72.2 to 78.0 overall. NIE-Stop reaches 76.9 overall and 52.3 on long paths; NIE-Path raises long-path performance to 55.4, compared with 46.7 for the unadapted encoder. A shuffled-order control under the full path objective loses 3.2 points. Without public-benchmark training, the same adapter also improves nDCG@10 by 1.9 points on standard BEIR HotpotQA. NIE therefore provides a lightweight adaptation channel for settings where trajectories are already retained, with zero incremental labeling cost.
Harness-G, a graph-structured retrieval framework that reformulates free-form query generation as finite action selection, and introduces Structured Non-myopic Credit (SNC), which uses a frozen answer scorer to compare the selected action with its alternatives and assigns downstream gains to the earlier actions that enabled them.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a fundamental paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, while recent structure-augmented approaches organize documents into graphs to improve information access, their retrieval strategies remain largely static, relying on similarity ranking or static probability diffusion. We identify that this paradigm suffers from two inherent limitations in complex reasoning: popularity bias, where retrieval paths are trapped by high-degree distractors, and signal decay, where relevance signals attenuate over long reasoning chains. To overcome these challenges, we propose NaviRAG, a novel framework that reformulates retrieval as a reinforcement learning-driven dynamic navigation problem on schema-less knowledge graphs (KGs). Unlike passive diffusion, NaviRAG employs an agent that actively traverses the graph to act as a search-space pruning engine, identifying logical multi-hop reasoning paths. Technically, we introduce three key components: (1) Structure-Aware Query Expansion, which bridges the modality gap between unstructured queries and structured graph seeds for precise initialization; (2) Target-Driven Reward Shaping, which provides dense supervision based on semantic progress toward gold documents, effectively mitigating the sparse reward problem in large-scale graph traversal; and (3) a Multi-View Hybrid Reranking strategy that operates on the highly-pruned candidate subgraph, integrating policy confidence, semantic relevance, and global structural importance to ensure robust candidate selection. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop QA datasets and two single-hop QA datasets demonstrate that NaviRAG significantly outperforms baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in multi-hop QA while maintaining robustness in single-hop QA. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CkingEW/NaviRAG.
Jinghong Lei, Wang Kun, Zhigang Chen et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
HypoSearch is proposed, which generates lightweight hypotheses as soft search hints, explores them through bounded independent branches, and compares branch-level evidence before commitment, and consistently outperforms single-trajectory search and standard parallel baselines.
Ruochen Zhou, Zheng-Zong Chen, Luan Zhang et al.· 0 citations
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