Flash-Searcher: Fast and Effective Web Agents via DAG-Based Parallel Execution

Tianrui Qin, Qianben Chen, Sinuo Wang, He Xing, King Zhu, He Zhu, Dingfeng Shi, Xinxin Liu, Ge Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou

Keywords: Workflow Optimization, Agent Reasoning, WebAgent, Deep Research

TL;DR: This paper proposes a DAG-based parallel LLM agent framework that resolves sequential inefficiency via concurrent subtasks, outperforms baselines, and shows generalizability on agent models to advance efficient complex reasoning.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks when equipped with external tools. However, current frameworks predominantly rely on sequential processing, leading to inefficient execution particularly for tasks requiring extensive tool interaction. This paper introduces Flash-Searcher, a novel parallel agent reasoning framework that fundamentally reimagines the execution paradigm from sequential chains to directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Flash-Searcher decomposes complex tasks into subtasks with explicit dependencies, enabling concurrent execution of independent reasoning paths while maintaining logical constraints. Through dynamic workflow optimization, our framework continuously refines the execution graph based on intermediate results, effectively integrating summary module. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Flash-Searcher consistently outperforms existing approaches. Specifically, it achieves **67.7%** accuracy on BrowseComp and **83%** on xbench-DeepSearch, while reducing agent execution steps by up to **35%** compared to current frameworks. Furthermore, when distilling this parallel reasoning pipeline into single models, we observe substantial performance gains across diverse backbone architectures, underscoring the generalizability of our methodology. Our work thus represents a significant advance in agent architecture design, offering a more scalable and efficient paradigm for complex reasoning tasks.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 4375