Lost in the Maze: Overcoming Context Limitations in Long-Horizon Agentic Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yen, Howard, Paranjape, Ashwin, Xia, Mengzhou, Venkatesh, Thejas, Hessel, Jack, Chen, Danqi, Zhang, Yuhao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yen, Howard
Paranjape, Ashwin
Xia, Mengzhou
Venkatesh, Thejas
Hessel, Jack
Chen, Danqi
Zhang, Yuhao
author_facet Yen, Howard
Paranjape, Ashwin
Xia, Mengzhou
Venkatesh, Thejas
Hessel, Jack
Chen, Danqi
Zhang, Yuhao
contents Long-horizon agentic search requires iteratively exploring the web over long trajectories and synthesizing information across many sources, and is the foundation for 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. Then, we 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. On long-horizon tasks, SLIM achieves comparable performance at substantially lower cost and with far fewer tool calls than strong open-source baselines across multiple base models. Specifically, with o3 as the base model, SLIM achieves 56% on BrowseComp and 31% on HLE, outperforming all open-source frameworks by 8 and 4 absolute points, respectively, while incurring 4-6x fewer tool calls. Finally, we release an automated fine-grained trajectory analysis pipeline and error taxonomy for characterizing long-horizon agentic search frameworks; SLIM exhibits fewer hallucinations than prior systems. We hope our analysis framework and simple tool design inform future long-horizon agents.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18939
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lost in the Maze: Overcoming Context Limitations in Long-Horizon Agentic Search
Yen, Howard
Paranjape, Ashwin
Xia, Mengzhou
Venkatesh, Thejas
Hessel, Jack
Chen, Danqi
Zhang, Yuhao
Computation and Language
Long-horizon agentic search requires iteratively exploring the web over long trajectories and synthesizing information across many sources, and is the foundation for 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. Then, we 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. On long-horizon tasks, SLIM achieves comparable performance at substantially lower cost and with far fewer tool calls than strong open-source baselines across multiple base models. Specifically, with o3 as the base model, SLIM achieves 56% on BrowseComp and 31% on HLE, outperforming all open-source frameworks by 8 and 4 absolute points, respectively, while incurring 4-6x fewer tool calls. Finally, we release an automated fine-grained trajectory analysis pipeline and error taxonomy for characterizing long-horizon agentic search frameworks; SLIM exhibits fewer hallucinations than prior systems. We hope our analysis framework and simple tool design inform future long-horizon agents.
title Lost in the Maze: Overcoming Context Limitations in Long-Horizon Agentic Search
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18939