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Auteurs principaux: Zhong, Shuzhang, Lu, Baotong, Chen, Qi, Liu, Chuanjie, Yang, Fan, Li, Meng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07416
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author Zhong, Shuzhang
Lu, Baotong
Chen, Qi
Liu, Chuanjie
Yang, Fan
Li, Meng
author_facet Zhong, Shuzhang
Lu, Baotong
Chen, Qi
Liu, Chuanjie
Yang, Fan
Li, Meng
contents Large language model-based deep research agents have been increasingly popular for addressing long-horizon information-seeking tasks, but they often incur high end-to-end latency due to extensive reasoning and frequent tool use. Speculation frameworks aim to reduce latency by overlapping action execution with reasoning; however, existing approaches typically rely on uniform speculation strategies and strict action matching, which limits inference speedups and robustness. In this work, we revisit the speculate-verify paradigm for deep research agents through the lens of action heterogeneity. We show that \textit{Search} and \textit{Visit} actions exhibit fundamentally different reasoning and model capacity requirements: entropy-based analysis reveals that Search decisions have higher uncertainty and benefit significantly from explicit reasoning, whereas Visit decisions have lower entropy and depend primarily on model capacity. Motivated by this dual-process characteristic, we propose DualSpec, a heterogeneous speculation framework equipped with a lightweight, confidence-based semantic verifier. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that DualSpec achieves up to 3.28$\times$ end-to-end speedup while maintaining accuracy comparable to fully reasoning agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07416
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DualSpec: Accelerating Deep Research Agents via Dual-Process Action Speculation
Zhong, Shuzhang
Lu, Baotong
Chen, Qi
Liu, Chuanjie
Yang, Fan
Li, Meng
Machine Learning
Large language model-based deep research agents have been increasingly popular for addressing long-horizon information-seeking tasks, but they often incur high end-to-end latency due to extensive reasoning and frequent tool use. Speculation frameworks aim to reduce latency by overlapping action execution with reasoning; however, existing approaches typically rely on uniform speculation strategies and strict action matching, which limits inference speedups and robustness. In this work, we revisit the speculate-verify paradigm for deep research agents through the lens of action heterogeneity. We show that \textit{Search} and \textit{Visit} actions exhibit fundamentally different reasoning and model capacity requirements: entropy-based analysis reveals that Search decisions have higher uncertainty and benefit significantly from explicit reasoning, whereas Visit decisions have lower entropy and depend primarily on model capacity. Motivated by this dual-process characteristic, we propose DualSpec, a heterogeneous speculation framework equipped with a lightweight, confidence-based semantic verifier. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that DualSpec achieves up to 3.28$\times$ end-to-end speedup while maintaining accuracy comparable to fully reasoning agents.
title DualSpec: Accelerating Deep Research Agents via Dual-Process Action Speculation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07416