# SocialBuddy: Tailoring Search Agent for Social Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01641/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 15 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 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, 15 of 15)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20094/) (2024)
- [MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20670/) (2025)
- [MindSearch: Mimicking Human Minds Elicits Deep AI Searcher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20183/) (2024)
- [RAGGED: Towards Informed Design of Scalable and Stable RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09040/) (2024)
- [SearchLVLMs: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Augmenting Large Vision-Language Models by Searching Up-to-Date Internet Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14554/) (2024)
- [SoMe: A Realistic Benchmark for LLM-based Social Media Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14720/) (2025)
- [SoulSeek: Exploring the Use of Social Cues in LLM-based Information Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01094/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the era of digital social interaction, searching friends' posts from massive social streams has become a fundamental user need. However, while modern agentic search frameworks have achieved remarkable success in conventional retrieval tasks, they break down when confronted with heterogeneous user queries and multi-dimensional social feeds, resulting in severe performance degradation in complex social search. To bridge this gap, we introduce SocialBuddy, the first agentic search framework tailored for social scenarios. Specifically, we construct SocialEnv, the first large-scale simulated environment for social search. Powered by an automated data and trajectory synthesis pipeline, SocialEnv includes 200K user profiles, 10 million social posts, and 50K reasoning trajectories, establishing a solid foundation for the development of social search agents. To tackle the credit assignment dilemma caused by sparse rewards in social search, we design SocialPO, a hybrid-granularity optimization framework. It macroscopically reinforces successful reasoning paths via multi-dimensional rewards, while microscopically rectifying deviated trajectories through fine-grained prefix truncation and token-level supervision. This hybrid-granularity design delivers multi-scale guidance in complex long-sequence scenarios. Finally, we construct SocialSearch Benchmark to provide a quantitative evaluation scheme for assessing the social search capabilities of SocialBuddy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SocialBuddy-35B surpasses significantly larger frontier LLMs. Code and dataset will be released upon article acceptance.