Strategic Navigation or Stochastic Search? How Agents and Humans Reason Over Document Collections
Multimodal agents offer a promising path to automating complex document-intensive workflows. Yet, a critical question remains: do these agents demonstrate genuine strategic reasoning, or merely stochastic trial-and-error search? To address this, we introduce MADQA, a benchmark of 2,250 human-authored questions grounded in 800 heterogeneous PDF documents. Guided by Classical Test Theory, we design it to maximize discriminative power across varying levels of agentic abilities. To evaluate agentic behaviour, we introduce a novel evaluation protocol measuring the accuracy-effort trade-off. Using this framework, we show that while the best agents can match human searchers in raw accuracy, they...
| Authors | Łukasz Borchmann, Jordy Van Landeghem, Michał Turski et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 March 2026 |
Models and datasets referencing this paper
- OxRML/MADQADataset
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.