让智能体直接操作原始文档,突破传统检索瓶颈。
Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction

- 智能体用 grep 等工具直接读取原始文档,跳过向量索引
- 在多个数据集上超越密集/稀疏检索基线,多跳问答准确率超 70%
- 适合需要精细控制和动态调整的复杂搜索任务
当前检索系统通过固定相似度接口压缩访问,仅支持单次 top-k 检索,难以满足智能体搜索需求。为突破此限制,本文提出直接文档交互(DCI):智能体使用通用终端工具(如 grep、shell 命令)直接操作原始语料库,无需嵌入模型、向量索引或检索 API。该方法无需离线索引,天然适应动态变化的本地语料。在 BRIGHT、BEIR 等信息检索基准及端到端智能体搜索任务中,DCI 在多个数据集上显著优于强基线(包括稀疏、密集检索与重排序模型),并在 BrowseComp-Plus 与多跳问答任务中实现高精度(>70%),且不依赖传统语义检索器。结果表明,随着语言智能体能力增强,检索质量不仅取决于推理能力,更取决于与语料库交互的界面分辨率,而 DCI 开启了智能体搜索中更广阔的接口设计空间。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Modern retrieval systems, whether lexical or semantic, expose a corpus through a fixed similarity interface that compresses access into a single top-k retrieval step before reasoning. This abstraction is efficient, but for agentic search, it becomes a bottleneck: exact lexical constraints, sparse clue conjunctions, local context checks, and multi-step hypothesis refinement are difficult to implement by calling a conventional off-the-shelf retriever, and evidence filtered out early cannot be recovered by stronger downstream reasoning. Agentic tasks further exacerbate this limitation because they require agents to orchestrate multiple steps, including discovering intermediate entities, combining weak clues, and revising the plan after observing partial evidence. To tackle the limitation, we study direct corpus interaction (DCI), where an agent searches the raw corpus directly with general-purpose terminal tools (e.g., grep, file reads, shell commands, lightweight scripts), without any embedding model, vector index, or retrieval API. This approach requires no offline indexing and adapts naturally to evolving local corpora. Across IR benchmarks and end-to-end agentic search tasks, this simple setup substantially outperforms strong sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on several BRIGHT and BEIR datasets, and attains strong accuracy on BrowseComp-Plus and multi-hop QA without relying on any conventional semantic retriever. Our results indicate that as language agents become stronger, retrieval quality depends not only on reasoning ability but also on the resolution of the interface through which the model interacts with the corpus, with which DCI opens a broader interface-design space for agentic search.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。