Designing tool-integrated reasoning agent systems for complex chemical tasks remains a fundamental challenge. Although recent chemical agents have demonstrated promising performance through the integration of external tools, they are still built on the autoregressive paradigm, which is inherently constrained by causal attention and left-to-right generation. As a result, they often struggle with bidirectional molecular understanding, global coordinated tool planning and multi-source evidence integration. To address this challenge, we introduce ChemDiffAgent, the first masked diffusion language agent for tool-integrated chemical reasoning. It reformulates chemical reasoning as iterative denoising over interleaved reasoning and tool-use trajectories, enabling tool-use decisions to be jointly determined under full-trajectory context and thereby better aligning the agent's decision boundary with its knowledge boundary. We further analyze how this paradigm benefits agentic reasoning through harder infilling subproblems during training and flexible arbitrary-order decoding during inference. Then we develop a two-stage post-training framework, comprising agentic supervised fine-tuning and variance-reduced preference optimization, to enhance tool-use and reasoning capabilities. We also construct a comprehensive benchmark covering six chemistry tasks across both single-turn and multi-turn tool-use scenarios. Under matched budgets and evaluation, ChemDiffAgent consistently outperforms autoregressive agents, achieving an overall improvement of approximately 20%. Notably, our 8B model achieves performance comparable to, in some cases surpassing, significantly larger frontier models, such as GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13330
Modeling human reactions to spatial audio requires understanding both what is heard and where it comes from. Prior work generates motion offline from complete acoustic and spatial input sequences. Humans, however, react to sounds without knowing what they will hear next. We present Sonic-AMG, to our knowledge the first framework for streaming human motion generation from spatial audio. The model encodes acoustic content and body-relative source geometry as separate tokens. Conditioned on these tokens, a causal transformer with a flow head generates continuous motion latents, from which a causal decoder reconstructs motion segments. Standard teacher-forced training derives motion histories and body-relative source locations from ground-truth motion, whereas streaming inference relies on generated motion for both, resulting in a training-inference mismatch. To reduce this history discrepancy, we introduce rehearsal training, which combines full-sequence teacher-forced supervision with supervised prediction along short autoregressive self-rollouts. To keep spatial conditioning consistent with generated motion, we propose spatial feedback, which recomputes body-relative source locations from generated root poses during both rehearsal training and inference. On SAM, Sonic-AMG achieves state-of-the-art FID and R-precision. It further supports real-time online generation of coherent reactions across sound events and source locations. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13300
High-precision retrieval over external knowledge bases is essential for LLM agents to operate effectively. However, existing Information Retrieval (IR) research primarily optimizes query-side retrievers (e.g., ColBERT, BGE) and generators (e.g., Self-RAG, GraphRAG), while reducing corpus-side representation to chunking. This leaves index-side quality an underexplored lever. We propose Pre-Retrieval Index Modeling & Enhancement (PRIME), an index-side optimization framework built on two complementary tracks: an LLM-driven Semantic Restructuring (SR) track that transforms long documents into structured, information-dense sections, and a deterministic Metadata Synthesis (MS) and Hierarchical Retrieval (HR) track that extracts semantic anchors and heading structure for coarse-to-fine section retrieval. Our evaluations show that deterministic metadata matches structure-aware chunking's retrieval quality while cutting embedding computation by 45.8 $\times$ and index vector count by 22.4 $\times$. On top of these gains, Semantic Restructuring (SR) further improves Answer-F1 by 13.7% in full deployment, with characterized quality-fidelity-cost trade-offs. Across QASPER, BRIGHT, and NFCorpus, we further characterize three qualitative regimes that determine whether index-side optimization helps or degrades retrieval, while showing that these index-side effects are neutralized under a strong reranker.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13296
Can a vision model learn what words mean from pixels alone? We show that the two largest DINOv3 vision transformers organize words rendered in images by word meaning, despite being pretrained using self-supervision on images only, without paired captions, class labels, or other language supervision. We derive word representations from embedding differences between word images and matched controls, then test whether semantically related words are neighbors within each model's embedding space, while controlling for spelling similarity. We find that brand names in the same industry group together, as do nouns from the same semantic domain. Country-capital pairs exhibit consistent vector offsets, similarly to word embeddings trained on text. These word representations also align with the representations of the visual object categories they name. DINOv3-H and DINOv3-7B are, to our knowledge, the first self-supervised vision models to show substantial semantic structure for rendered words. Comparisons with text and speech encoders reveal shared structure among representations of the same words. Contrastive alignment with either encoder further strengthened DINOv3-H's word-level semantic structure, while leaving the other finetuned vision models largely unchanged. Image-only training can therefore teach vision models not just what words look like, but also how their meanings relate.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13252
End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on real-world driving logs, which record only the trajectory actually executed in each scene. This provides limited supervision for learning alternative valid behaviors. Multi-target supervision can mitigate this limitation, but broader trajectory coverage makes safe candidate selection more challenging. We propose FPD-Drive, an end-to-end planner that distills privileged future knowledge into a visual driving policy to improve both multi-trajectory supervision and safety selection. Specifically, we introduce Future-Privileged Multi-Target Distillation to transfer diverse, high-quality trajectory targets from a teacher with access to recorded future observations to the student. These targets extend supervision beyond the single recorded human trajectory. For candidate selection, we further introduce Safety-Aware Score Correction to correct ranking errors between nearby safe and unsafe candidates and raise underestimated safety scores of safe candidates. At deployment, the student requires neither future observations nor teacher inference. Our base model achieves 94.9 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 navtest and 55.9 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2 navhard. The scaled FPD-Drive-Pro improves these scores to 95.5 PDMS and 58.1 EPDMS, respectively, achieving SOTA performance among the compared methods on both benchmarks. Zero-shot closed-loop evaluation on HUGSIM further yields an HD-Score of 45.1 and RC of 55.3.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13232
Video generation supports digital content creation, with applications in virtual avatars, AI-driven filmmaking, interactive game engines, and world models. State-of-the-art systems achieve controllability primarily through image-to-video (I2V) generation, in which an injected anchor image determines the identity, composition, and style of the resulting video. In modern pipelines, this anchor is synthesized by a text-to-image (T2I) generator. This raises a largely overlooked question: Are images obtained directly from the T2I model truly suitable for current video models? Our analysis shows that anchor aesthetic and quality scores are weakly correlated with downstream video quality. The structure-and-texture score is negatively correlated with I2V video quality in both the visual and motion dimensions. Fine-tuning the T2I model on an image reward accordingly yields anchors with visibly denser structural and character detail: they score higher on image metrics, yet lower the video reward on every I2V model we test and change downstream motion unpredictably. We therefore introduce Golden Anchor Learning (GAL), to our knowledge the first framework for learning golden anchors by optimizing a T2I generator with downstream video feedback. GAL evaluates candidate anchors through the videos they induce under a frozen I2V model and converts video rewards into image-level preferences for DPO fine-tuning of the T2I generator. On all four I2V models, GAL raises the VBench average by $2.97\%$--$8.46\%$ over the untuned generator. The rendered clips also score higher under VideoReward-Overall, and their extracted frames under HPSv3 and UniPercept. GAL yields consistent motion gains across all four I2V models, as measured by a $5.62\%$--$38.24\%$ increase in VBench dynamic degree. Although GAL is trained only on HunyuanVideo-1.5 renders, these gains extend to the other three I2V models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13217
Large language models have significantly lowered the barrier to writing code. Naturally, this has also led to the development of data science agents that promise automating the design and execution of data science from task formulation to model development. Existing evaluations of agentic data science (agentic DS) assess downstream predictive performance and code correctness, providing preliminary insight in agentic DS capabilities. We argue that these evaluations overlook the fundamental principles of data science: methodological data science- and domain knowledge. As such, only assessing downstream performance masks methodological failures such as data leakage and inappropriate validation, limiting the development of robust agentic DS systems. In this paper, we evaluate agentic DS beyond accuracy from three different angles: 1) a large-scale analysis of failure modes in common agentic DS frameworks and models across 220 data science tasks, 2) a reusable and extensible test suite with curated data science tasks that test for six specific failures in a controlled manner, and 3) a qualitative assessment of agentic DS pipelines against expert solutions on Kaggle competitions. We find that the majority of agentic solutions contain at least one failure mode despite the complexity of agentic harness or model capacity. Moreover, we identify a positive correlation between the occurrence of data leakage failures and predictive performance, confirming the necessity to evaluate agents beyond accuracy. Our qualitative analysis shows that DS agents generally lack problem solving creativity and domain knowledge, compared to competition-winning data scientists. We believe that principled failure mode analysis, as presented here, should be integral part of agentic DS evaluations, and that the insights we surface will be key in developing trustworthy agentic DS pipelines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14115
World models enable large language model (LLM) agents to anticipate action effects and make informed decisions. For generalization, it is desirable for such world models to transfer efficiently to new environments with similar interaction structure and underlying dynamics. Recent approaches encode world dynamics as symbolic rules or executable programs, whose compositional structure in principle affords transfer, but still organize such knowledge around environment-specific objects. To address this limitation, we introduce RoleWorld, a symbolic world modeling approach which uses reusable prototypes and environment-specific parameter values as functional role abstractions to represent how objects behave in interactions. From interaction trajectories, a teacher LLM extracts role prototypes and executable transition rules defined over role instances, together with a skill that guides the actor LLM to use role information in decision making. In a target world, without the teacher, the actor uses this skill together with its current role assignments and parameter estimates, and actively tests a role instance hypothesis through interaction when its uncertainty affects the current decision. Feedback from each action refines role assignments and estimates parameter values online, with no LLM parameter updates and the transition rules held fixed. Experiments on MARS benchmark show that RoleWorld enables robust generalization across environments with significantly altered object behavior, suggesting that functional role abstractions can serve as an effective component for knowledge transfer in world modeling. Project Page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13172
Reinforcement learning (RL) for search agents often suffers from evidence fabrication, a failure mode where agents bypass external information ($E_{ext}$) and fabricate an incorrect answer. We argue that this fabrication arises from an over-reliance on unreliable internal knowledge ($E_{int}$) as shortcuts due to the inherent opacity of reasoning trajectories. To address this, we propose SOAR (SOurce-Aware Reinforcement learning), a paradigm that transforms monolithic reasoning into source-explicit trajectories. SOAR (i) disentangles $E_{ext}$ and $E_{int}$ into parallel, observable streams via a Source-Aware Workflow, and (ii) incorporates Source-Consistent Reward to guide the policy evolution. By making information-source attribution explicit, SOAR enables precise credit assignment between different knowledge streams. Evaluations show that SOAR outperforms baselines on 3B and 7B backbones by 7.3% and 5.4%, while reducing evidence fabrication by 74.8%. These confirm that SOAR significantly improves performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while effectively mitigating evidence fabrication, fostering more faithful and grounded reasoning with enhanced robustness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13157
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) generally fall short of expectations in Fine-Grained Visual Recognition (FGVR), although they exhibit promising FGVR foundations, i.e., visual perception and broad category knowledge. Most existing studies seek to remedy this deficiency by adopting domain-specific post-training, at the risk of compromising generalization to unseen domains. Different from these efforts, in this paper, we revisit the FGVR mechanism underlying MLLMs from both the empirical and theoretical perspectives and uncover an inference-time phenomenon termed FGVR Laziness. In brief, FGVR Laziness refers to the insufficient association between visual cues and category concepts under certain candidate category lists and recognition guidance, leaving the FGVR foundations of MLLMs largely under-utilized. To mitigate FGVR Laziness, we propose Laziness-resIstant Visual rEcognition (LIVE), a training-free framework which jointly refines candidate lists and recognition guidance to elicit the latent FGVR capability of MLLMs. Specifically, LIVE first performs query-adaptive candidate inference to derive a compact yet reliable candidate list. Meanwhile, LIVE constructs category-specific FGVR skills by mining the intra-category characteristics and inter-category differences. Finally, LIVE selectively invokes detailed skill guidance according to recognition uncertainty and category confusion, shifting MLLM-based FGVR from a cursory glance to a focus on associating discriminative visual cues with category concepts. Extensive experiments on 13 benchmarks against 24 state-of-the-art methods spanning fine-grained category recognition, action recognition, and general category recognition, verify the effectiveness and generalizability of LIVE across different MLLM backbones. The code will be released upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13154
We present Neurograf v1, an experimental end-to-end Romanian-first language-model pipeline developed to investigate the feasibility of training language models from scratch for a lower-resource European language. The pipeline comprises RoSfera, a 635 GB Romanian corpus containing 175.7 million documents; an 80k byte-level BPE tokenizer; five decoder-only models ranging from 160M to 6B parameters, trained on 131 billion tokens; three instruction-tuned assistants; and two contrastively trained embedding models. Training and evaluation were conducted using computing infrastructure at ELI-NP/IFIN-HH. The model family exhibits consistent scaling of validation loss and increasing Romanian factual and cultural knowledge with model size. On the 1,000-question WWTBM benchmark, Neurograf-6B achieves 69.89% accuracy on Romanian-context questions, while Neurograf-3.2B reaches 67.38%. Compute-optimal analysis yields a parameter-scaling exponent of approximately 0.423. Neurograf v1 serves as an experimental demonstrator rather than a production system. The study identifies practical challenges involving diacritic preservation, corpus quality, data composition, and tokenization efficiency, while demonstrating the feasibility of developing Romanian-first base models, instruction-following assistants, and semantic embedding models within a unified training pipeline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13134
Question answering over large heterogeneous document collections requires first finding the right passages and then reading them, yet current retrieval-augmented agents give one model both kinds of tools and let it schedule itself. We present KnowForge, a pipeline separated by job: a hybrid-retrieval knowledge-point index; a Locator agent that can only search; a code-scheduled bridge judge that forces the missing second hop; a typed, size-bounded evidence pool that merges every search's ranking; a Deep Reader agent that can only read text, images and tables; and a synthesizer with a format checker. With a self-hosted Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (3B active), KnowForge reaches F1 47.5 on the full open-domain M3DocVQA (2,441 questions, 3,368 PDFs), +11.0 over the published M3DocRAG system and +7.1 over one-shot retrieve-and-answer on the same index and model, and 53.5 with DeepSeek-V4-Flash. On MultiHop-RAG it reaches 73.5 accuracy, above the strongest published RAG and GraphRAG results (71.2); on the single-document MMLongBench-Doc it lifts the same model from 34.8 to 47.0, level with GPT-4o reading page images (46.3). Per-job ablations on the full benchmarks attribute the gain: the Deep Reader is worth 3.8, 9.8 and 0 points on the three corpora, tracking how visual each is; merging both agents into one with all tools and twice the rounds loses 1.9 F1 because it keeps searching instead of reading; a round-budget sweep shows a step at four Locator rounds and a plateau beyond; query latency scales with model calls rather than corpus size. We serve the three indexed benchmarks as read-only knowledge bases (free registration) and release all prompts and the runner code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13128
As large language models (LLMs) acquire advanced biological design capabilities, they offer substantial research benefits but simultaneously introduce severe dual-use risks, such as engineering enhanced pathogens or drug-resistant bacteria. While biosecurity frameworks recognize these threats, the actual risk of LLMs executing dangerous biological modifications remains unquantified, particularly when augmented with specialized biological design tools (BDTs). Existing evaluations primarily assess hazardous knowledge possession rather than practical application, overlook risk amplification from BDTs, and rely on unreliable, expensive, or hazardous validation methods. To address these gaps, we introduce DRYLAB-Bench (Design Risk Yielded by LLM Agent in Biodesign), the first comprehensive benchmark evaluating the high-risk biological mutation design capabilities of LLM agents. Moving beyond basic question-answering, DRYLAB-Bench tasks agents with 30 genuinely hazardous mutation-design scenarios distilled from biosecurity guidelines. It evaluates models in a multi-round, tool-augmented environment where LLMs orchestrate BDTs to iteratively refine candidates. Crucially, it scores designs directly against 187,695 empirical wet-lab measurements from ProteinGym and ViroGym using our proposed Biosecurity Risk Score (BRS), quantifying risk-associated effects while enabling scalable and safe ground-truth verification. Evaluations of 15 frontier models reveal substantial baseline threats: without tools, 67.6% of one-shot designs exceed the average measured variant, and 21.4% reach the highest-risk decile. Equipping models with BDTs significantly amplifies this risk, raising the pooled risk by \(\Delta BRS=+0.116\) and the top-decile share to 23.5%. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13116
Continual post-training faces a dual challenge of acquisition and retention: models must learn new capabilities while preserving prior knowledge. While Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT) mitigates this using self-supervision with in-context demonstrations, it relies on strong in-context learning and instruction-following abilities. Consequently, SDFT fails on smaller models critical for low-latency, on-device use. To enable continual learning at smaller scales, we first identify the root cause of failure. We show that poor acquisition and forgetting correlate linearly with the post-trained model's distribution shift, revealing the necessity of in-distribution learning. We thus introduce Synthetic Self-Distillation (SynthSelf), imitating SDFT's in-distribution rewrite by outsourcing the task to a minimally larger, same-family aligner. Coupled with off-policy supervision and rejection sampling, this provides the high-quality supervision small models require without breaking their original distribution. Evaluations spanning 4 acquisition datasets (including a mixture) and 14 retention benchmarks show SynthSelf consistently outperforms 6 methods (including off- and on-policy distillation) across 3 small model scales. Extensive further analyses confirm SynthSelf paves the way toward effective small-model continual learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13113
Radiology reports are essential for diagnostic reasoning and patient care, yet their manual preparation is time-consuming and cognitively demanding. Automatic radiology report generation (RRG) offers a scalable alternative, but existing models often produce lengthy, unstructured narratives that overlook diagnostic cues and multi-view information. We present Clinical-Knowledge Guided Disease-aware Visual-Textual Alignment for QA-Style Radiology Report Generation (CliQ-RRG), a unified two-stage framework for interpretable and clinically grounded reporting. In Stage 1, CliQ-RRG employs a Disease-aware Visual-Textual Alignment module that aligns image and text representations using predicted disease embeddings, reinforced by a Prior-Guided Attention Module (PrAM) to capture multi-view dependencies across current and prior scans. In Stage 2, GraphRAG-guided retrieval augments intermediate textual representations with graph-grounded clinical evidence, and a large language model restructures them into concise, interpretable question-answer (QA) pairs with diagnostic summaries. Experiments on two public chest X-ray benchmarks demonstrate that CliQ-RRG consistently outperforms prior methods across both lexical and clinical metrics, generating accurate and clinically coherent QA-style radiology reports. Code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13059
Large language model agents increasingly operate in long-horizon environments where early mistakes can trigger cascading failures and trap agents in dead-end trajectories. Agents must therefore be able to proactively recover from such states and turn their exploratory experience into guidance for subsequent decisions. We introduce ReTRAIL, a framework that enables agents to rewind the environment to earlier states while preserving valid progress and carrying forward knowledge learned from abandoned exploration. The environment state moves backward while the agent's knowledge continues to move forward. ReTRAIL trains a shared policy with two complementary signals: State-Anchored GRPO compares alternative continuations from revisited states to improve execution, while a branch-advancement reward guides reflection through the progress of subsequent exploration. Experiments across four interactive benchmark MineSweeper, Sokoban, ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that simply adding a rewind primitive provides limited benefit and can even degrade performance. In contrast, ReTRAIL enables agents to rewind from unproductive states and use insights from abandoned branches to guide subsequent exploration. These results demonstrate the value of coupling environment rewinding with experience reuse within an ongoing task for long-horizon task solving. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13058
RGB-X tracking leverages complementary modalities, such as thermal infrared, event, or depth, to improve robustness under challenging conditions. Existing general-purpose RGB-X trackers typically follow two paradigms: independent task-specific training and joint training across modality combinations. However, the former suffers from knowledge isolation and model redundancy, while the latter introduces optimization interference across heterogeneous tasks. In this work, we present UniMergeTrack, a new model merging paradigm that preserves task-specific optimization while enabling effective cross-task knowledge integration. UniMergeTrack first trains modality-specific trackers independently and then performs hierarchical model merging. Specifically, transferable backbones are merged across RGB-X tasks via high-pass-filtered merging, and complemented by lightweight task-specific experts that preserve modality-specific cues. Tracking heads are merged within each task using optimal transport-guided channel alignment to mitigate hidden channel mismatch. A subsequent distribution alignment fine-tuning stage further improves compatibility between the unified backbone and task-specific heads. Extensive experiments on the LasHeR, RGBT234, VisEvent, VOT-RGBD22, COESOT, and CDTB benchmarks demonstrate that UniMergeTrack achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across RGB-Thermal, RGB-Event, and RGB-Depth tracking tasks, while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen datasets. The source code will be released upon acceptance. The source code of this paper will be released on this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13053
Computer-use agents can perform increasingly complex GUI tasks, yet unfamiliar software and workflows requiring human domain knowledge remain challenging. Human demonstrations convey procedural knowledge through the same GUI interaction space, but reuse requires interpreting actions in context and separating workflow rules from task-specific details. We thus introduce Work2Skill, a framework that captures human GUI experience for reusable agent skill induction. WorkRecorder provides the framework's infrastructure for collecting this experience, aligning screen recordings, mouse and keyboard events, and available accessibility-tree information. Using WorkRecorder, we construct WorkDemo-350, the first synchronized multimodal dataset of human desktop GUI demonstrations for reusable agent skill induction and downstream evaluation. Its 350 demonstrations are screened for completeness and task success. We then propose an agentic skill-induction method that inspects evidence on demand to produce reusable skills capturing workflow rules, step dependencies, and completion checks. When the same four execution models are equipped with skills induced by each method under shared execution settings, Work2Skill achieves the highest scores and success rates. Mean score improvements over the corresponding No Skill baseline are 4.67--10.54 points on MyPCBench Bounded Action and 3.11--7.50 points on a 286-task subset of OSWorld-Verified. Our code and data are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12984
Video editing models achieve strong performance in modifying appearance, backgrounds, styles, and motions, empowered by large-scale training data. Beyond general scenarios, professional motions are significant in performance, sports, and martial arts. This paper focuses on professional motion editing, which involves fine-grained motion technique and temporal structure. Given professional motion names but lacking detailed descriptions, existing models often fail to generate professional motions, such as incorrectly lifting the front wheel under a Stoppie instruction. To address this challenge, we introduce MotionCoach, a trained multimodal agent that uses multi-turn tools and performs self-verification, producing a grounded prompt and a reference clip as reliable and sufficient multimodal guidance to inject external professional motion knowledge into video editing models. To supply training data, we build a data pipeline to construct trajectories. We cold-start the agent on MotionCoach-SFT-10k and apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on MotionCoach-RL-2k with rewards on the motion guidance prompt, the motion outcome video, and the format. For evaluation, we introduce VPMEBench, comprising 314 professional motion editing tasks with fine-grained references and annotations. Extensive experiments show that MotionCoach improves the overall score from 55.1 to 65.6 on Seedance 2.0 and from 51.2 to 64.5 on MiniMax-H3. Learning to construct multimodal guidance enables precise professional motion editing without retraining video editing models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12963
Search agents extend large reasoning models with multi-round access to external knowledge, yet most existing systems largely conflate retrieving evidence with consuming it. Retrieved documents are commonly incorporated according to fixed or rank-based policies, despite the fact that evidence utility is conditioned on the agent's current reasoning state. Consequently, a lower-ranked candidate may be critical for the current step, while a higher-ranked candidate may provide redundant, irrelevant, or misleading information. We formulate this overlooked problem as evidence admission, which asks, at each search step, which retrieved candidates should be allowed to enter the agent's evolving reasoning context. To enable such selective control, we introduce SEEDS (Selective Evidence Entry During Search), a preview-guided evidence admission framework for search agents. SEEDS first exposes lightweight previews of retrieved candidates and then lets the agent jointly determine which candidates and how many should be fully inspected, conditioned on its current reasoning state. Unlike fixed or adaptive prefix policies, SEEDS can select arbitrary subsets with flexible cardinality, and it can be instantiated directly with an existing reasoning agent or further optimized through learning. Across nine knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks under both local corpus and live web search, SEEDS consistently improves search effectiveness while substantially reducing full-evidence consumption. Experimental analyses show that SEEDS more effectively selects useful candidates beyond the corresponding retrieval prefix. These results establish evidence admission as a complementary dimension of agentic search, separating what information is retrieved from what information is ultimately allowed to shape reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12932