Aggregation Queries over Unstructured Text: Benchmark and Agentic Method
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Aggregation query over free text is a long-standing yet underexplored problem. Unlike ordinary question answering, aggregate queries require exhaustive evidence collection and systems are required to "find all," not merely "find one." Existing paradigms such as Text-to-SQL and Retrieval-Augmented Generation fail to achieve this completeness. In this work, we formalize entity-level aggregation querying over text in a corpus-bounded setting with strict completeness requirement. To enable principled evaluation, we introduce AGGBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate completeness-oriented aggregation under realistic large-scale corpus. To accompany the benchmark, we propose DFA (Disambiguation--Filtering--Aggregation), a modular agentic baseline that decomposes aggregation querying into interpretable stages and exposes key failure modes related to ambiguity, filtering, and aggregation. Empirical results show that DFA consistently improves aggregation evidence coverage over strong RAG and agentic baselines. The data and code are available in hrefhttps://anonymous.4open.science/r/DFA-A4C1.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 30 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2026.
Builds on
30 of 44 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking11 Aug
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul
Other references · 28
- 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,779
- 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
- 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
- 2023Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflectioncited by 1,800
- 2020Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Stepscited by 1,259
- 2020ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERTcited by 1,160
- 2018Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Taskcited by 1,120
- 2022Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questionscited by 911
- 2019DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphscited by 883
- 2017Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questionscited by 777
16 more
- 2017Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learningcited by 679
- 2023Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Modelscited by 551
- 2019RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parserscited by 420
- 2018The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questionscited by 409
- 2018From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communitiescited by 379
- 2024LightRAG: Simple and Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 310
- 2019QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Compositioncited by 248
- 2020Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-domain Question Answeringcited by 186
- 2020Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrievalcited by 160
- 2024RAT: Retrieval Augmented Thoughts Elicit Context-Aware Reasoning in Long-Horizon Generationcited by 75
- 2023MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpuscited by 59
- 2023LIQUID: A Framework for List Question Answering Dataset Generationcited by 19
- 2025ACORD: An Expert-Annotated Retrieval Dataset for Legal Contract Draftingcited by 11
- 2025FinGEAR: Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer Retrievalcited by 5
- 2022Interactive Query Clarification and Refinement via User Simulationcited by 3
- 2025From Chat Logs to Collective Insights: Aggregative Question Answeringcited by 3
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Agent-Orchestrated Adaptive RAG: A Comparative Study on Structured and Multi-Hop Retrieval
- 2026Follow the Entities: A Corpus Map for Agentic Search
- 2025ER-RAG: Enhance RAG with ER-Based Unified Modeling of Heterogeneous Data Sources
- 2026Agent-Enhanced Heterogeneous Graph RAG for Academic Question Answering
- 2026Projecting BrowseComp-Plus onto ClimbMix: Toward More Realistic Corpora for Agentic Search
- 2026Bridging Static and Agentic RAG for Taiwanese Historical Question Answering
- 2025BookRAG: A Hierarchical Structure-aware Index-based Approach for Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Complex Documents
- 2026SAGE: Structure Aware Graph Expansion for Retrieval of Heterogeneous Data