Towards Self-Evolving Agentic Literature Retrieval

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

PaSaMaster is a self-evolving agentic literature retrieval system that iteratively refines search intent and produces evidence-grounded paper rankings, outperforming GPT-5.2 by 30% at 1% cost with zero hallucinations.

As large language models reshape scientific research, literature retrieval faces a twofold challenge: ensuring source authenticity while maintaining a deep comprehension of academic search intents. While reliable, traditional keyword-centric search fails to capture complex research intents. Frontier LLMs can handle complex research intents, but their high cost and tendency to hallucinate remain key limitations. Here we introduce PaSaMaster, a self-evolving agentic literature retrieval system that produces relevance-scored paper rankings with evidence-grounded recommendations through iterative intent analysis, retrieval, and ranking. It is built on three key designs. First, it transforms literature retrieval from a one shot query--document matching problem into a search process that evolves over time, using ranked evidence to reveal gaps, refine intents, and guide follow-up searches. Second, it prevents hallucinated sources by treating retrieval as intent--paper relevance ranking rather than generation. Finally, PaSaMaster improves cost efficiency by separating planning from retrieval: a frontier LLM is used only for intent understanding, while large scale retrieval and relevance scoring are delegated to customized corpora and lightweight models. Evaluated on the PaSaMaster Benchmark across 38 scientific disciplines, our system exposes the severe inaccuracy and incompleteness of traditional keyword retrieval (improving F1-score by 15.6X) and the unreliability of generative LLMs (which exhibit hallucination rates up to 37.79%). Remarkably, PaSaMaster outperforms GPT-5.2 by 30.0% at a mere 1% of the computational cost while ensuring zero source hallucination: https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/PaSaMaster
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 05/15/26, 04:24 AM

Paper page - Towards Self-Evolving Agentic Literature Retrieval

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.14306 Authors:

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

Abstract

PaSaMaster is a self-evolving agentic literature retrieval system that improves academic search accuracy and cost efficiency through iterative intent analysis and evidence-based ranking.

Aslarge language modelsreshape scientific research,literature retrievalfaces a twofold challenge: ensuring source authenticity while maintaining a deep comprehension of academic search intents. While reliable, traditional keyword-centric search fails to capture complex research intents. Frontier LLMs can handle complex research intents, but their high cost and tendency to hallucinate remain key limitations. Here we introduce PaSaMaster, a self-evolving agenticliterature retrievalsystem that produces relevance-scored paper rankings withevidence-grounded recommendationsthrough iterativeintent analysis, retrieval, and ranking. It is built on three key designs. First, it transformsliterature retrievalfrom a one shot query--document matching problem into asearch processthat evolves over time, using ranked evidence to reveal gaps, refine intents, and guide follow-up searches. Second, it prevents hallucinated sources by treating retrieval as intent--paperrelevance rankingrather than generation. Finally, PaSaMaster improves cost efficiency by separating planning from retrieval: a frontier LLM is used only for intent understanding, while large scale retrieval and relevance scoring are delegated to customized corpora and lightweight models. Evaluated on thePaSaMaster Benchmarkacross 38 scientific disciplines, our system exposes the severe inaccuracy and incompleteness of traditional keyword retrieval (improving F1-score by 15.6X) and the unreliability of generative LLMs (which exhibithallucinationrates up to 37.79%). Remarkably, PaSaMaster outperforms GPT-5.2 by 30.0% at a mere 1% of thecomputational costwhile ensuring zero sourcehallucination: https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/PaSaMaster

View arXiv pageView PDFGitHub1Add to collection

Get this paper in your agent:

hf papers read 2605\.14306

Don’t have the latest CLI?curl \-LsSf https://hf\.co/cli/install\.sh \| bash

Models citing this paper0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2605.14306 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2605.14306 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2605.14306 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper0

No Collection including this paper

Add this paper to acollectionto link it from this page.

Similar Articles

Consensus accelerates research with GPT-5 and Responses API

OpenAI Blog

Consensus, a research assistant with 8 million users, has launched Scholar Agent—a multi-agent system built on GPT-5 and OpenAI's Responses API—that can synthesize peer-reviewed literature across 220 million papers in minutes. The system uses coordinated Planning, Search, Reading, and Analysis agents to mirror how human researchers work, reducing hallucinations and improving reliability over previous approaches.