The Scheduler Is a Hidden Retriever: How Asynchrony Shapes Evidence Acquisition in Search Agents
Language-model agents increasingly solve complex tasks through parallel reasoning and asynchronous information gathering. Controlled replay across two model families and three benchmarks shows that delivery timing redirects search decisions made before all results arrive, despite identical initial evidence. Acquisition disagreement reaches up to 24 percentage points above same-order repeat variation. This dependence persists after all initial evidence arrives and through a second search, turning temporary differences in what agents have seen into lasting differences in what they acquire. An acquisition-regret bound with a matching construction shows that invariance at a fixed early arriva...
| Authors | Ruiyang Ren, Yuhao Wang, Yinan Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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