Fetch-then-Explore: Decoupling Selection from Extraction over a Persistent Workspace for Search Agents
Search agents now answer questions that take dozens of searches to settle, yet how such an agent reads a page has drawn far less attention than how it finds one. Nearly all of them use one of two document interfaces, and both tie a page to the moment it is opened. \emph{Visit-and-read} injects a reading of the page into the message history at fetch time, fixing that reading before the agent knows which fact it will need. Stateful \emph{browsing} instead extracts on demand from the page in hand, but holds one page at a time and releases it as soon as the agent opens another. Either way, a page that turns out to matter many turns later has to be fetched and rendered into context all over ag...
| Authors | Qi Liu, Yiqun Chen, Zidan Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
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