FORT synthesizes shortcut-resistant search tasks by controlling four identified shortcut risks across entity selection, graph construction, question formulation, and refinement, producing training data that yields agents with longer search trajectories and top performance among open-source models on
OpenSeeker-v2: Pushing the Limits of Search Agents with Informative and High-Difficulty Trajectories
2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Deep search capabilities have become an indispensable competency for frontier Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet their development remains dominated by industrial giants. The typical industry recipe involves a highly resource-intensive pipeline spanning pre-training, continual pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL). In this report, we show that when fueled with informative and high-difficulty trajectories, a simple SFT approach could be surprisingly powerful for training frontier search agents. By introducing three simple data synthesis modifications: scaling knowledge graph size for richer exploration, expanding the tool set size for broader functionality, and strict low-step filtering, we establish a stronger baseline. Trained on merely 10.6k data points, our OpenSeeker-v2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across 4 benchmarks (30B-sized agents with ReAct paradigm): 46.0% on BrowseComp, 58.1% on BrowseComp-ZH, 34.6% on Humanity's Last Exam, and 78.0% on xbench, surpassing even Tongyi DeepResearch trained with heavy CPT+SFT+RL pipeline, which achieves 43.4%, 46.7%, 32.9%, and 75.0%, respectively. Notably, OpenSeeker-v2 represents the first state-of-the-art search agent within its model scale and paradigm to be developed by a purely academic team using only SFT. We are excited to open-source the OpenSeeker-v2 model weights and share our simple yet effective findings to make frontier search agent research more accessible to the community.
fields
cs.CL 2years
2026 2representative citing papers
Scaling the delegation backbone in hierarchical search agents improves EM by ~11 points while scaling the executor moves EM by only ~2.6 points, and a 1.7B SFT executor matches a frontier sub-agent at 37% fewer tokens.
citing papers explorer
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FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents
FORT synthesizes shortcut-resistant search tasks by controlling four identified shortcut risks across entity selection, graph construction, question formulation, and refinement, producing training data that yields agents with longer search trajectories and top performance among open-source models on
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Think Big, Search Small: Where Capacity Matters in Hierarchical Search Agents?
Scaling the delegation backbone in hierarchical search agents improves EM by ~11 points while scaling the executor moves EM by only ~2.6 points, and a 1.7B SFT executor matches a frontier sub-agent at 37% fewer tokens.