Mitigating Context Interference for Reliable and Efficient Search Agents

Recent research empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) as multi-turn search agents to iteratively retrieve and generate outputs until complex tasks are solved. However, the contexts of multi-turn search agents are lengthy and complex. For example, the retrieved set of documents in each turn would inevitably introduce irrelevant information that distracts LLMs, referring to context interference, potentially hindering the reliability and efficiency of search agents. Therefore, we conduct a systematic study on context interference in multiturn search agents, focusing on investigating i) which parts of the context of search agents will contribute to the context interference, ii) how to refine the contexts of search agents to mitigate the interference, and iii) can incorporating context refinement into search agent training yield further improvements. We reveal that interference primarily arises from the latest retrieved documents. Based on the explored findings, we then introduce a distill-based context refiner to dynamically mitigate context interference for multi-turn search agents. Finally, we validate that incorporating context refinement into RL training pipelines of search agents can significantly enhance both reliability and efficiency. This study highlights the importance of mitigating context interference of search agents, inspiring a novel paradigm of "refine context and then generate" for AI agents. <question> Who was the director of Lost Command? </question> <think> I don't have knowledge. I need to conduct a search. </think> <search> Who directed the film "Lost Command"? </search> <information> Doc 1 (Title: "The Command (2005 film)") ... The Command (2005 film) is a 2005 in film Iranian film directed by Masoud Kimiai.