Argus: Evidence Assembly for Scalable Deep Research Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Deep research agents have achieved remarkable progress on complex information seeking tasks. Even long ReAct style rollouts explore only a single trajectory, while recent state of the art systems scale inference time compute via parallel search and aggregation. Yet deep research answers are composed of complementary pieces of evidence, which parallel rollouts often duplicate rather than complete, yielding diminishing returns while pushing the aggregation context toward the model's limit. We propose Argus, an agentic system in which a Searcher and a Navigator cooperate to treat deep research as assembling a jigsaw from complementary evidence pieces, rather than brute forcing the whole answer in parallel. The Searcher collects evidence traces for a given sub-query through ReAct-style interaction. The Navigator maintains a shared evidence graph, verifying which pieces are still missing, dispatching Searchers to gather them, and reasoning over the completed graph to produce a source-traced final answer. We train the Navigator with reinforcement learning to verify, dispatch, and synthesize, while independently training the Searcher to remain a standard ReAct agent. The resulting Navigator supports rollouts with a single Searcher or many in parallel without retraining. With both Searcher and Navigator built on a 35B-A3B MoE backbone, Argus gains 5.5 points with a single Searcher and 12.7 points with 8 parallel Searchers, averaged over eight benchmarks. With 64 Searchers it reaches 86.2 on BrowseComp, surpassing every proprietary agent we benchmark, while the Navigator's reasoning context stays under 21.5K tokens.
Key facts. Cited by 6 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 48 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.
Builds on
48 of 58 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
Same direction, newest first
- 2026MiroThinker-1.7 & H1: Towards Heavy-Duty Research Agents via Verification16 Mar
- 2025ParallelMuse: Agentic Parallel Thinking for Deep Information Seeking28 Oct
- 2025WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement Learning16 Sep
- 2025WebExplorer: Explore and Evolve for Training Long-Horizon Web Agents8 Sep
- 2025WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agent3 Jul
- 2025WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency28 May
- 2025Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models9 Jan
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents25 Jul
Other references · 40
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 10,109
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,708
- 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,789
- 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,442
- 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Modelscited by 3,211
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,988
- 2024Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameterscited by 1,986
- 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,808
- 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,784
- 2021WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedbackcited by 1,745
28 more
- 2024From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarizationcited by 1,453
- 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,395
- 2023FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generationcited by 1,282
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,128
- 2022Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Modelscited by 1,075
- 2024Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Samplingcited by 991
- 2022Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedbackcited by 901
- 2023Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Modelcited by 861
- 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 647
- 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineeringcited by 587
- 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 501
- 2025WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capabilitycited by 335
- 2023Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Modelscited by 324
- 2024HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Modelscited by 281
- 2023FacTool: Factuality Detection in Generative AI -- A Tool Augmented Framework for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Scenarioscited by 251
- 2025WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversalcited by 175
- 2024Long-form factuality in large language modelscited by 155
- 2025BrowseComp-ZH: Benchmarking Web Browsing Ability of Large Language Models in Chinesecited by 145
- 2025ReSum: Unlocking Long-Horizon Search Intelligence via Context Summarizationcited by 141
- 2025xbench: Tracking Agents Productivity Scaling with Profession-Aligned Real-World Evaluationscited by 120
- 2023Mindstorms in Natural Language-Based Societies of Mindcited by 107
- 2025AgentFold: Long-Horizon Web Agents with Proactive Context Managementcited by 103
- 2025SealQA: Raising the Bar for Reasoning in Search-Augmented Language Modelscited by 75
- 2025WebResearcher: Unleashing unbounded reasoning capability in Long-Horizon Agentscited by 68
- 2026FrontierScience: Evaluating AI's Ability to Perform Expert-Level Scientific Taskscited by 47
- 2026Agentic Aggregation for Parallel Scaling of Long-Horizon Agentic Taskscited by 18
- 2026PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoningcited by 17
- 2025Pushing Test-Time Scaling Limits of Deep Search with Asymmetric Verificationcited by 12
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agentscited by 7
- 2026Apodex 1.1: Scaling Agentic Intelligence for Complex Workcited by 2
- 2026Mint-Agent: Introducing Finance-Native Agentic Foundation Modelscited by 0
- 2026LongCat-DeepResearch Technical Reportcited by 0
- 2026Programmatic Search Agents: Extending Agentic Search Beyond Query Reformulationcited by 0
- 2026Failure Recovery via Belief Updates and World Modeling for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 0
- 2026Failure Recovery via Belief Updates and World Modeling for Long-Horizon Agents13 Oct 2026
- 2026Programmatic Search Agents: Extending Agentic Search Beyond Query Reformulation5 Oct 2026
- 2026LongCat-DeepResearch Technical Report28 Sep 2026
- 2026Apodex 1.1: Scaling Agentic Intelligence for Complex Work24 Aug 2026
- 2026Mint-Agent: Introducing Finance-Native Agentic Foundation Models17 Aug 2026
- 2026FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents10 Jun 2026
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