Search-Time Contamination in Deep Research Agents: Measuring Performance Inflation in Public Benchmark Evaluation
Public benchmarks enable fair and reproducible evaluation of LLM reasoning, but they become fragile for deep research agents that actively search the web during inference. Such agents may retrieve public benchmark metadata, question context, or even ground-truth answers via web search. This gives rise to Search-Time Contamination (STC), where external retrieval bypasses intended reasoning and inflates measured performance. We systematically study STC in deep research agent evaluation. We define three contamination types with increasing severity, namely Benchmark Metadata Leakage, Question-Context Leakage, and Explicit Answer Leakage, and develop detection algorithms to identify them and q...
| Authors | Yongjie Wang, Xinyue Zhang, Kunhong Yao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 3 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 June 2026 |
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