用渐进披露提升长文档问答效率,小任务靠智能,大任务靠分层阅读。
Is Progressive Disclosure All You Need for Long-Context Agents?
- 用分层披露机制,按需逐步展示文档内容,减少无效上下文。
- 在多本书任务中,一层披露比全读或两层披露更稳定,准确率更高。
- 适合处理超长文档的智能体,尤其当人工检索成本高时使用。
长文档问答通常面临两个选择:将全文加载进上下文窗口,或外接检索器。代理式AI提供新思路——给代理文档路径,由其自主决定读取内容。通过将技能封装为可按需加载的Agent Skills包,实现渐进披露:从简要描述逐步展开到具体段落。尽管实践者迅速采用此模式应对书本级理解任务,但缺乏实证支持。本文首次开展受控实验,对比原始文档导航、多种Agent Skills设计与经典混合检索器,在三个代理框架和三个模型家族上评估InfiniteBench数据集表现。单本书任务中,收益取决于代理框架:若代理导航能力弱则增益显著,若已有强分割与检索能力则几乎无提升。扩展至跨多本书任务时,原始文档导航迅速失效,一层渐进披露退化较慢并反超。增加第二层深度反而无益,甚至降低准确率,故一层已足够。渐进披露提供的是上下文空间,而非智能;当代理本身能精准定位时冗余,但在文档规模过大难以全读时则成为关键优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Long-document question answering usually forces a choice between loading the whole document into the context window and bolting on a separate retriever. Agentic AI suggests a broader option, giving the agent the document path and letting it decide how and what to read. Agent Skills, a standard for packaging expertise into folders an agent loads on demand, supply a ready mechanism: progressive disclosure, which exposes only what a query needs, from a short description down to the specific passages. Practitioners rapidly adopted this pattern for book-length understanding tasks, but the evidence to support such choices has been anecdotal. We run the first controlled study of the pattern, comparing raw-document navigation and several designs of Agent Skills packs against a classical hybrid retriever across three agent harnesses and three model families on InfiniteBench. On a single book, the gain depends on the harness, running large when the agent navigates the raw document poorly but near zero when a strong agent harness already divides and retrieves on its own. When scaling up to tasks that span many books, raw-document navigation collapses while one-level progressive disclosure degrades more slowly and pulls ahead. A second, deeper routing level never helps and sometimes breaks accuracy outright, so one level is enough. Progressive disclosure buys context, not intelligence: it is redundant while a strong agent can locate the right passages itself, and decisive once the corpus grows too large to navigate by reading.
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