Beyond Monolithic Architectures: A Multi-Agent Search and Knowledge Optimization Framework for Agentic Search
This work addresses the limitations of existing agent-based search systems, which suffer from prolonged reasoning chains, sparse rewards, and credit assignment difficulties due to their monolithic architecture, ultimately undermining learning stability. To overcome these challenges, the authors propose M-ASK, a novel framework that decouples the search task into two specialized agents: a search behavior agent responsible for action execution and a knowledge management agent tasked with maintaining a compressed contextual representation. These agents are jointly optimized through turn-level fine-grained rewards. By integrating a multi-agent architecture, large language model tool invocation, and context compression techniques, M-ASK significantly outperforms strong baselines on multi-hop question answering benchmarks, achieving both higher answer accuracy and markedly improved training stability.