Hybrid Deep Searcher: Scalable Parallel and Sequential Search Reasoning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission15801 Authors

Keywords: Multi-hop QA, RAG, Reasoning

TL;DR: We propose HybridDeepSearcher, a scalable search agent that dynamically integrates parallel and sequential strategies,trained on HDS-QA,a novel hybrid-hop dataset with supervised trajectories.

Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) combined with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have enabled deep research agents capable of multi-step reasoning with external knowledge retrieval. However, previous methods that extend reasoning with single-query search steps struggle to scale to complex tasks demanding broad document exploration. Meanwhile, approaches that generate multiple independent queries simultaneously may limit deeper, sequential reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose HybridDeepSearcher that dynamically integrates parallel and sequential search strategies to enable effective search scaling. To support training, we introduce HDS-QA, a novel dataset that seamlessly integrates broad parallel search with sequential search reasoning, providing answer trajectories in the form of reasoning-query-retrieval loops with parallel sub-queries. Across all five benchmarks, our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, improving F1 scores by +15.9 on FanOutQA and +11.5 on a subset of BrowseComp. Further analysis reveals that HybridDeepSearcher effectively scales performance with additional test-time search resources and demonstrates robustness on questions requiring more evidence, achieving higher evidence coverage. We include the code in the supplementary materials and will release the dataset and code publicly.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 15801