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Lost in the Maze: Overcoming Context Limitations in Long-Horizon Agentic Search (arxiv.org)
1 point by ashwinpp 344 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Agentic web search systems drown in long, noisy histories and run out of room. This framework splits searching from browsing and regularly compresses the trail into short summaries, matching stronger systems' accuracy while using 4 to 6 times fewer tool calls.

Abstract

Long-horizon agentic search requires iteratively exploring the web over long trajectories and synthesizing information across many sources, enabling powerful applications like deep research systems. In this work, we show that popular agentic search frameworks struggle to scale to long trajectories primarily due to context limitations--they accumulate long, noisy content, hit context window and tool budgets, or stop early. We therefore introduce SLIM (Simple Lightweight Information Management), a simple framework that separates retrieval into distinct search and browse tools, and periodically summarizes the trajectory, keeping context concise while enabling longer, more focused searches. Across a wide range of long-horizon tasks, SLIM achieves comparable performance at substantially lower cost and far fewer tool calls than strong open-source frameworks with both proprietary and open-weight models, including RL-trained models for deep research. Specifically, with o3 as the base model, SLIM achieves 56% on BrowseComp and 33% on HLE, outperforming all open-source frameworks by 8 and 6 absolute points, respectively, while incurring 4-6x fewer tool calls. With GLM-4.7 Flash, SLIM achieves 10 points improvement over the next best open-source framework, Search-o1, on BrowseComp using a third of the cost. To systematically understand failure modes in long-horizon agentic search, we develop an automated fine-grained trajectory analysis pipeline and error taxonomy, and find that SLIM exhibits significantly fewer hallucinations than prior systems. We hope our analysis framework and simple tool design inform future long-horizon agents.

Howard Yen, Yoonsang Lee, Ashwin Paranjape, Mengzhou Xia, Thejas Venkatesh, Jack Hessel, Danqi Chen, Yuhao Zhang
arXiv:2510.18939 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 21, 2025 · updated Jul 14, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · COLM 2026; Code and data are available here: https://github.com/howard-yen/SLIM

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