Lazy Grounding: Attacking Search Agents with Factual Evidence
Search agents mitigate hallucination by grounding their answers in retrieved web results. However, retrieval-based approaches also introduce an attack surface: agents may cite misinformation from poisoned search corpora containing false or malicious documents. We demonstrate that, in some cases, search agents' reasoning and responses may be steered by completely factual but distracting information. We refer to this failure as lazy grounding. We expose lazy grounding by injecting nearby evidence from answer-changing rewrites of benchmark questions into the search corpora. Each document contains factual evidence that supports a neighboring rewritten question but is retrieved for the origina...
| Authors | Yulin Zhang, Yukun Huang, Sanxing Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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