# Rerank Before You Reason: Analyzing Reranking Tradeoffs through Effective Token Cost in Deep Search Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Rethinking Agentic Search with Pi-Serini: Is Lexical Retrieval Sufficient?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10848/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Text Ranking in Deep Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21456/) (2026)
- [When Deep Research Agents Stagnate: Enhancing Reasoning with Retrieval-Aware Agent Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15191/) (2026)
- [RVR: Retrieve-Verify-Retrieve for Comprehensive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18425/) (2026)
- [Question's Gambit: The First Move Matters in Agentic Deep Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14412/) (2026)
- [BoundaryMORPH: Budgeted Reranking via Active Set Selection for Diffuse Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27213/) (2026)
- [SEEDS: Preview-Guided Evidence Admission for Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12932/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep research agents rely on iterative retrieval and reasoning to answer complex queries, but scaling test-time computation raises significant efficiency concerns. We study how to allocate reasoning budget in deep search pipelines, focusing on the role of listwise reranking. Using the BrowseComp-Plus benchmark, we analyze tradeoffs between model scale, reasoning effort, reranking depth, and total token cost via a novel effective token cost (ETC) metric. Our results show that reranking consistently improves retrieval and end-to-end accuracy, and that moderate reranking often yields larger gains than increasing search-time reasoning, achieving comparable accuracy at substantially lower cost. All our code is available at https://github.com/sahel-sh/DeepHone