Think Big, Search Small: Where Capacity Matters in Hierarchical Search Agents?
Large language model based search agents increasingly adopt multi-agent architectures in which a main agent decomposes a complex question into sub-queries and dispatches them to parallel sub-agents. However, existing systems instantiate all roles from a single model of identical scale, leaving open how model capacity should be distributed across roles. We factorize hierarchical search into three roles: a delegation role responsible for task decomposition, an execution role responsible for retrieval and evidence extraction, and an answer generation role held fixed as a confound control. We then conduct controlled capacity sweeps along the delegation and execution axes on five multi-hop QA ...
| Authors | Qinnan Cai, Yibo Zhao, Xiang Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 July 2026 |
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