Terminology: Search Agents vs. Research Agents and RL Strategy

CShorten30 · x · 2026-08-16

The author argues that the term "Search Agents" is ill-suited for systems performing multi-hop retrieval tasks like BrowseComp-Plus, suggesting "Research Agents" instead. While there is power in RL'ing a model to process intermediate results and write optimized queries, this does not cleanly map to traditional search tasks like BEIR or LoTte.

The post raises a key question: at the intersection of search and research agents, should a research agent be RL'd using BM25 or an optimized Search Agent as its tool?

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