mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Q2D-Web: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Retrieval in Agentic RAG Systems

arXiv 2609.08887 ↗First posted 8 Sep 2026cs.IR cs.CLcited by 0

On the map: Retrieval-augmented generation → Agentic RAG, agents and memory

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating first-stage retrievers in large-scale production RAG requires a benchmark that pairs a large-scale corpus with a large set of agent-reformulated search queries based on real user queries and their conversation threads, and that labels many relevant documents per query. No existing public benchmark evaluates this setting: large-scale collections typically provide only a small number of evaluation queries, whereas benchmarks with many queries generally contain only millions of documents. Moreover, most benchmarks assess human-written queries, while the first-stage retrievers in agentic RAG pipelines serve machine-written reformulations whose distribution differs from human search behavior. To overcome these evaluation gaps, we introduce Q2D-Web (Query2Doc-Web), a large-scale agentic retrieval benchmark consisting of a 190M-document web corpus and 70k agentic search queries in ten languages, reformulated from real-world user queries in production systems. Q2D-Web provides three sets of fixed relevance judgments: agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set that unions both signals and adds LLM-based judgments of unlabeled pooled documents to reduce false negatives. We benchmark 13 retrievers including lexical, dense, and late-interaction models and find that their relative ordering is largely insensitive to the choice of judgment set, while diverging substantially across topical domains, query languages, and query types. To enable fast evaluation, we also study subcorpus sampling as an approximation to full-corpus evaluations. Retaining a third of the corpus, selected by reciprocal rank fusion over pooled retriever runs, preserves the full-corpus model ranking under the combined judgments while raising absolute Recall@1000 only by 4 to 7 points. The public leaderboard is accessible under: https://huggingface.co/spaces/perplexity-ai/q2d-web-leaderboard

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation. Builds on 36 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2026.

Builds on

36 of 56 references.

References · 36

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,297
  2. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,754
  3. 2016MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Datasetcited by 1,605
  4. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,444
  5. 2024A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 1,423
  6. 2018FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERificationcited by 1,375
  7. 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,261
  8. 2021BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Modelscited by 1,252
  9. 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 647
  10. 2021ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interactioncited by 476
  11. 2020RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 413
  12. 2024Measuring short-form factuality in large language modelscited by 373
24 more
  1. 2024Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Reportcited by 372
  2. 2023NLP Evaluation in trouble: On the Need to Measure LLM Data Contamination for each Benchmarkcited by 348
  3. 2020Overview of the TREC 2019 deep learning trackcited by 286
  4. 2024Nomic Embed: Training a Reproducible Long Context Text Embeddercited by 265
  5. 2024mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrievalcited by 236
  6. 2023Proving Test Set Contamination in Black Box Language Modelscited by 230
  7. 2019Multi-Stage Document Ranking with BERTcited by 201
  8. 2021SPLADE v2: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for Information Retrievalcited by 127
  9. 2024Jasper and Stella: distillation of SOTA embedding modelscited by 112
  10. 2023AnglE-optimized Text Embeddingscited by 99
  11. 2025A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challengescited by 62
  12. 2020The Curse of Dense Low-Dimensional Information Retrieval for Large Index Sizescited by 48
  13. 2021Evaluating the Robustness of Retrieval Pipelines with Query Variation Generatorscited by 34
  14. 2024Ragnar"ok: A Reusable RAG Framework and Baselines for TREC 2024 Retrieval-Augmented Generation Trackcited by 32
  15. 2024On Leakage of Code Generation Evaluation Datasetscited by 32
  16. 2022ClueWeb22: 10 Billion Web Documents with Visual and Semantic Informationcited by 20
  17. 2024A Large-Scale Study of Relevance Assessments with Large Language Models: An Initial Lookcited by 18
  18. 2025Overview of the TREC 2021 deep learning trackcited by 18
  19. 2021Shallow pooling for sparse labelscited by 13
  20. 2024AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmarkcited by 12
  21. 2025Overview of the TREC 2023 deep learning trackcited by 9
  22. 2026Diffusion-Pretrained Dense and Contextual Embeddingscited by 9
  23. 2024MS MARCO Web Search: a Large-scale Information-rich Web Dataset with Millions of Real Click Labelscited by 7
  24. 2026DenseOn with the LateOn: Fully Open Dense and Late-Interaction Models for Multilingual, Long-Context, and Code Searchcited by 6

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026A-RAG: Scaling Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Hierarchical Retrieval Interfaces
  2. 2025InfoDeepSeek: Benchmarking Agentic Information Seeking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  3. 2025Am I on the Right Track? What Can Predicted Query Performance Tell Us about the Search Behaviour of Agentic RAG
  4. 2026Beyond Semantic Similarity: Performance and Costs of Agentic Retrieval for Complex Tasks
  5. 2026AgenticRAGTracer: A Hop-Aware Benchmark for Diagnosing Multi-Step Retrieval Reasoning in Agentic RAG
  6. 2025Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge
  7. 2026Do We Still Need GraphRAG? Benchmarking RAG and GraphRAG for Agentic Search Systems
  8. 2026Is Agentic RAG worth it? An experimental comparison of RAG approaches