VLDB talk: DR Tulu and AgentIR argue deep research needs co-designed agents and retrievers

CShorten30 · x · 2026-09-05

Akari Asai's VLDB talk covered DR Tulu and AgentIR, arguing deep research demands co-designing agents and retrievers. Key threads: training agents end-to-end for open-ended, hard-to-verify tasks — DR Tulu uses rubrics to train agents to leverage BM25 or vector retrievers with strong results — and letting retrievers exploit an agent's reasoning rather than just its latest query, via AgentIR's embedding model trained on intermediate reasoning plus search queries. The sharer suggests combining AgentIR with BM25/ColBERT-style feedback as a promising direction.

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