DeepSearch-World: Self-Distillation for Deep Search Agents in a Verifiable Environment
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Training tool-use agents to improve from their own experience remains challenging, as supervised fine-tuning relies on fixed teacher-distilled trajectories, while sparse-reward reinforcement learning provides weak supervision for long-horizon interactions. We present DeepSearch-Evolve, a self-distillation framework for web agents built on DeepSearch-World, a deterministic and verifiable environment with reproducible search and page-reading tools. DeepSearch-World contains 420K multi-hop QA tasks constructed from entity-level random walks and supports key agentic cognitive behaviors useful for self-evolving, including progress verification, grounded reflection, and failure recovery. DeepSearch-Evolve iteratively performs trajectory generation, filtering, data mixing, and fine-tuning to train stronger agents. Without distillation from more capable models, DeepSearch-World-9B achieves competitive performance compared with open-source agents, reaching 31.2% on BrowseComp, 61.5% on GAIA, and 93.4% on HotpotQA, showing that verifiable environments enable scalable self-evolution for long-horizon web agents. We will release the environment, 420K training pool, validation set, model, and code to facilitate future research on self-improving deep search agents.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 29 of its 50 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2026.
Builds on
29 of 50 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Marco DeepResearch: Unlocking Efficient Deep Research Agents via Verification-Centric Design30 Mar
- 2026OffSeeker: Online Reinforcement Learning Is Not All You Need for Deep Research Agents26 Jan
- 2025MiroThinker: Pushing the Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Research Agents via Model, Context, and Interactive Scaling14 Nov
- 2025Rethinking the Design of Reinforcement Learning-Based Deep Research Agents17 Oct
- 2025DeepDive: Advancing Deep Search Agents with Knowledge Graphs and Multi-Turn RL12 Sep
- 2025WebExplorer: Explore and Evolve for Training Long-Horizon Web Agents8 Sep
- 2025Beyond Ten Turns: Unlocking Long-Horizon Agentic Search with Large-Scale Asynchronous RL11 Aug
- 2025Cognitive Kernel-Pro: A Framework for Deep Research Agents and Agent Foundation Models Training1 Aug
- 2024OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization25 Oct
Other references · 20
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
- 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
- 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,084
- 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 616
- 2025Humanity's Last Examcited by 467
- 2026Reinforcement Learning via Self-Distillationcited by 285
- 2025DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environmentscited by 268
- 2025ZeroSearch: Incentivize the Search Capability of LLMs without Searchingcited by 203
- 2026On-Policy Context Distillation for Language Modelscited by 161
- 2025xbench: Tracking Agents Productivity Scaling with Profession-Aligned Real-World Evaluationscited by 118
8 more
- 2025Simulating Environments with Reasoning Models for Agent Trainingcited by 52
- 2025SALT: Step-level Advantage Assignment for Long-horizon Agents via Trajectory Graphcited by 22
- 2026AgentVista: Evaluating Multimodal Agents in Ultra-Challenging Realistic Visual Scenarioscited by 22
- 2026On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillationcited by 17
- 2026GenEvolve: Self-Evolving Image Generation Agents via Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillationcited by 15
- 2025StableToolBench-MirrorAPI: Modeling Tool Environments as Mirrors of 7,000+ Real-World APIscited by 14
- 2026Towards On-Policy Data Evolution for Visual-Native Multimodal Deep Search Agentscited by 6
- 2026GeoBrowse: A Geolocation Benchmark for Agentic Tool Use with Expert-Annotated Reasoning Tracescited by 3
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Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent
- 2026SelfSearch: Reward-Free Search for Self-Improving Agents
- 2025Fathom-DeepResearch: Unlocking Long Horizon Information Retrieval and Synthesis for SLMs
- 2025Search Self-play: Pushing the Frontier of Agent Capability without Supervision
- 2026Beyond Outcome Rewards: Step-Level Self-Distilled Policy Optimization for Deep Search Agents
- 2026SimpleSearch-VL: A Simple Recipe for Multimodal Agentic Deep Search
- 2026DeepSearchQA: Bridging the Comprehensiveness Gap for Deep Research Agents
- 2026SlimSearcher: Training Efficiency-Aware Web Agents via Adaptive Reward Gating