Zhicheng Dou

Tongyu Wen, Guanting Dong, Zhicheng Dou

Large language model (LLM)-based search agents have proven promising for addressing knowledge-intensive problems by incorporating information retrieval capabilities. Existing works largely focus on optimizing the reasoning paradigms of search agents, yet the quality of intermediate search queries during reasoning remains overlooked. As a result, the generated queries often remain inaccurate, leading to unexpected retrieval results and ultimately limiting search agents' overall effectiveness. To mitigate this issue, we introduce SmartSearch, a framework built upon two key mechanisms: (1) Process rewards, which provide fine-grained supervision for the quality of each intermediate search query through Dual-Level Credit Assessment. (2) Query refinement, which promotes the optimization of query generation by selectively refining low-quality search queries and regenerating subsequent search rounds based on these refinements. To enable the search agent to progressively internalize the ability to improve query quality under the guidance of process rewards, we design a three-stage curriculum learning framework. This framework guides the agent through a progression from imitation, to alignment, and ultimately to generalization. Experimental results show that SmartSearch consistently surpasses existing baselines, and additional quantitative analyses further confirm its significant gains in both search efficiency and query quality. The code is available at https://github.com/MYVAE/SmartSearch.

Yuyang Hu, Jiongnan Liu, Jiejun Tan et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as intelligent agents that reason, plan, and interact with their environments. To effectively scale to long-horizon scenarios, a key capability for such agents is a memory mechanism that can retain, organize, and retrieve past experiences to support downstream decision-making. However, most existing approaches organize and store memories in a flat manner and rely on simple similarity-based retrieval techniques. Even when structured memory is introduced, existing methods often struggle to explicitly capture the logical relationships among experiences or memory units. Moreover, memory access is largely detached from the constructed structure and still depends on shallow semantic retrieval, preventing agents from reasoning logically over long-horizon dependencies. In this work, we propose CompassMem, an event-centric memory framework inspired by Event Segmentation Theory. CompassMem organizes memory as an Event Graph by incrementally segmenting experiences into events and linking them through explicit logical relations. This graph serves as a logic map, enabling agents to perform structured and goal-directed navigation over memory beyond superficial retrieval, progressively gathering valuable memories to support long-horizon reasoning. Experiments on LoCoMo and NarrativeQA demonstrate that CompassMem consistently improves both retrieval and reasoning performance across multiple backbone models.