From Inertia to Objectivity: Improving Deep Research Agents with Noise Isolation

arXiv:2608.23045 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-08-24 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-08-24

Updated: 2026-08-27

Comments: EMNLP 2026 Main Conference

Code: https://github.com/PangSMPang/NIS-Agent

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Web search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong promise, but deep research tasks expose a recurring failure mode: once an agent has produced a query, plan, or intermediate

Terminology

Abstract

Web search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong promise, but deep research tasks expose a recurring failure mode: once an agent has produced a query, plan, or intermediate conclusion, it becomes less objective when later judging the consequences of that same action. We term this phenomenon inertia bias. To make it measurable, we introduce the IBIS benchmark, which controls the search observations while varying whether the model is evaluating the outcome of its own prior action. We find that models are substantially worse when they "own" the preceding search step, showing that self-authored action history can systematically distort subsequent judgment. We further show that this bias propagates into two forms of system-level degradation: search noise at the worker level and contextual noise at the manager level. To address this problem, we propose NIS-Agent, which applies context isolation at the two decision points most vulnerable to inertia bias: webpage triage and final-answer validation. Across GAIA, WebWalkerQA, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-zh, NIS-Agent achieves competitive performance while reducing token cost by 33% compared to our baseline. We further train an 8B model to be intrinsically more resistant to inertia bias; under the same NIS-Agent framework, it attains average performance comparable to GPT-4o on deep research benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/PangSMPang/NIS-Agent.

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