# OpenSeeker: Democratizing Frontier Search Agents by Fully Open-Sourcing Training Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15594/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 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.
- Builds on 20 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)
- [BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12516/) (2025)
- [GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15763/) (2026)
- [Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02276/) (2026)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02592/) (2025)
- [WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22648/) (2025)
- [BrowseComp-ZH: Benchmarking Web Browsing Ability of Large Language Models in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19314/) (2025)
- [AgentFold: Long-Horizon Web Agents with Proactive Context Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24699/) (2025)
- [MiroThinker: Pushing the Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Research Agents via Model, Context, and Interactive Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11793/) (2025)
- [WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07999/) (2025)
- [Tongyi DeepResearch Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24701/) (2025)
- [WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13305/) (2025)
- [DeepDive: Advancing Deep Search Agents with Knowledge Graphs and Multi-Turn RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10446/) (2025)
- [REDSearcher: A Scalable and Cost-Efficient Framework for Long-Horizon Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14234/) (2026)
- [Scaling Agents via Continual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13310/) (2025)
- [WebLeaper: Empowering Efficiency and Efficacy in WebAgent via Enabling Info-Rich Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24697/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Marco DeepResearch: Unlocking Efficient Deep Research Agents via Verification-Centric Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28376/) (2026)
- [LongSeeker: Elastic Context Orchestration for Long-Horizon Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05191/) (2026)
- [SAM: State-Adaptive Memory for Long-Horizon Reasoning Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24468/) (2026)
- [OpenSeeker-v2: Pushing the Limits of Search Agents with Informative and High-Difficulty Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04036/) (2026)
- [Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12191/) (2026)
- [FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12087/) (2026)
- [MiroEval: Benchmarking Multimodal Deep Research Agents in Process and Outcome](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28407/) (2026)
- [PBSD: Privileged Bayesian Self-Distillation for Long-Horizon Credit Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09348/) (2026)
- [DR-Venus: Towards Frontier Edge-Scale Deep Research Agents with Only 10K Open Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19859/) (2026)
- [Dr-DCI: Scaling Direct Corpus Interaction via Dynamic Workspace Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14885/) (2026)
- [S1-DeepResearch: Beyond Search, Toward Real-World Long-Horizon Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15367/) (2026)
- [SearchSwarm: Towards Delegation Intelligence in Agentic LLMs for Long-Horizon Deep Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09730/) (2026)
- [Measuring Epistemic Resilience of LLMs Under Misleading Medical Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12291/) (2026)
- [SearchArt: Training Long-Horizon Search Agent with Scalable Synthetic and Verified Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24850/) (2026)
- [ABSeeker: Training Long-Horizon Search Agents via Answer-Backtracked Credit Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05102/) (2026)
- [DuMate-DeepResearch: An Auditable Multi-Agent System with Recursive Search and Rubric-Grounded Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07299/) (2026)
- [SimpleSearch-VL: A Simple Recipe for Multimodal Agentic Deep Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31504/) (2026)
- [Diagnosing Search Behavior and Failure Modes in Long-Horizon Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01913/) (2026)
- [SearchAuditor: Auditing and Attributing Failures in Long-Horizon Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05212/) (2026)
- [ContextPilot: Teaching Agents for Proactive Context Management via Fine-grained RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28476/) (2026)
- [UNIBROWSE: A Data-to-Agent Framework for Multimodal BrowseComp](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10557/) (2026)
- [ToolAnchor: Anchoring Counterfactual Context to Boost Agentic Tool-use Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14145/) (2026)
- [Fetch-then-Explore: Decoupling Selection from Extraction over a Persistent Workspace for Search Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02097/) (2026)
- [Mind DeepResearch Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14518/) (2026)
- [BioMedArena: An Open-source Toolkit for Building and Evaluating Biomedical Deep Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06177/) (2026)
- [SciDataSailor: Deep Scientific Data Exploring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28098/) (2026)
- [G-ReAct: Graph-Guided Deep Search via Structure-State Co-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01324/) (2026)
- [Mint-Agent: Introducing Finance-Native Agentic Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16386/) (2026)
- [Iris: Climbing to the Search Frontier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04304/) (2026)
- [Boosting Deepresearch and LongContext Ability with Self-Generated Deepresearch Rollouts Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20844/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep search capabilities have become an indispensable competency for frontier Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet the development of high-performance search agents remains dominated by industrial giants due to a lack of transparent, high-quality training data. This persistent data scarcity has fundamentally hindered the progress of the broader research community in developing and innovating within this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce OpenSeeker, the first fully open-source search agent (i.e., model and data) that achieves frontier-level performance through two core technical innovations: (1) Fact-grounded scalable controllable QA synthesis, which reverse-engineers the web graph via topological expansion and entity obfuscation to generate complex, multi-hop reasoning tasks with controllable coverage and complexity. (2) Denoised trajectory synthesis, which employs a retrospective summarization mechanism to denoise the trajectory, therefore promoting the teacher LLMs to generate high-quality actions. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenSeeker, trained (a single training run) on only 11.7k synthesized samples, achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, xbench-DeepSearch, and WideSearch. Notably, trained with simple SFT, OpenSeeker significantly outperforms the second-best fully open-source agent DeepDive (e.g., 29.5% v.s. 15.3% on BrowseComp), and even surpasses industrial competitors such as Tongyi DeepResearch (trained via extensive continual pre-training, SFT, and RL) on BrowseComp-ZH (48.4% v.s. 46.7%). We fully open-source the complete training dataset and the model weights to democratize frontier search agent research and foster a more transparent, collaborative ecosystem.
