Question's Gambit: The First Move Matters in Agentic Deep Search
Deep research agents answer complex questions through iterative loops of searching, reading, and reasoning. Recent work on reasoning-intensive benchmarks such as BrowseComp-Plus shows that well-configured lexical retrieval can surface high-quality evidence, yet agents may still fail to connect documents carrying evidence to the gold documents. We identify a deep research agent's first retrieval move as an important design decision for this setting. We introduce Question's Gambit, a first-move retrieval module that decomposes the question into a set of clues, reformulates them into complementary searches, consolidates the retrieved results, and reranks the candidate pool before the agent b...
| Authors | Radin Hamidi Rad, Amin Bigdeli, Negar Arabzadeh et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 13 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 September 2026 |
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