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Superintelligent Retrieval Agent: The Next Frontier of Information Retrieval (arxiv.org)
16 points by CharlesW 147 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of many trial-and-error searches, this agent predicts the search words a question leaves out, drops ones too common or missing from the corpus, and runs one weighted keyword search. It topped the standard retrieval tests, beating dense and search-agent rivals without training labels.

Abstract · Superintelligent Retrieval Agent: The Next Frontier of Agentic Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented agents are increasingly the interface to large knowledge bases, yet most treat retrieval as a black box: they issue exploratory queries, inspect snippets, and reformulate until evidence emerges. This resembles how a newcomer searches an unfamiliar database rather than how an expert navigates it with strong priors about terminology and likely evidence, causing extra retrieval rounds, latency, and poor recall. We introduce \textit{Superintelligent Retrieval Agent} (SIRA), which casts \emph{superintelligence} in retrieval as compressing multi-round exploratory search into a single corpus-discriminative retrieval action. SIRA does not merely ask which terms are relevant; it asks which terms separate the desired evidence from corpus-level confusers. Offline, an LLM enriches each document with missing search vocabulary; at query time, it predicts evidence vocabulary the query omits; and corpus statistics serve as tool calls that filter terms that are absent, overly common, or unlikely to create retrieval margin. The final step is a single weighted BM25 call combining the query with the validated expansion. Across ten BEIR benchmarks, SIRA achieves the strongest average retrieval performance in our comparison, beating dense retrievers, learned sparse retrievers, and LLM search-agent baselines while using no relevance labels or retriever fine-tuning. On downstream QA, its retrieval-only answer coverage exceeds recent RL-trained agentic QA systems on NQ and HotpotQA. We also introduce \textbf{BrowseComp-Wikipedia}, a hard-search benchmark of 232 BrowseComp-derived queries over a 25,587,229-document Wikipedia index. Even without index-time enrichment, using only grounded Wikipedia categories, SIRA outperforms multi-round Perplexity agents at every budget, reaching 9.70% Recall@1, 15.27% Recall@10, and 36.14% Recall@100.

Zeyu Yang, Xu Han, Qi Ma, Jason Chen, Anshumali Shrivastava
arXiv:2605.06647 · cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted May 7, 2026 · updated Aug 24, 2026
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