cid 69317f70722859e4901ac756bc1b8cf0d38dd0701e1c85c355ade6faa0946c10 · original · open access · via openalex
Title: A New Role for Relevance: Guiding Corpus Interaction in Agentic Search Authors: Jiangnan Li; Yuqing Li; Mo Yu; Jinchao Zhang; Jie Zhou Venue: arXiv (Cornell University) Year: 2026 Canonical: doi:10.48550/arxiv.2607.24223 URL: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2607.24223 Collector: openalex OA: true ABSTRACT Relevance is a query-dependent estimate of whether a document or excerpt contains useful evidence. Existing retrieval agents use relevance to select top-$k$ content, but document relevance alone cannot localize, compose, or verify the evidence required by complex questions. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) enables such fine-grained operations through grep-style exploration, but its relevance-agnostic search can expose useful clues late and delay convergence. Recent advances use relevance to narrow the corpus into a working space for interaction. Once interaction begins, however, relevance still does not directly guide which documents grep searches first or distinguish informative excerpts from a broad set of matches to let LLMs see them first. We introduce the Relevance-Aware RipGrep Search Agent (RARG), which turns relevance into an execution prior for corpus interaction. RARG provides coarse-to-fine relevance guidance: it orders documents for sequential 'ripgrep' traversal to expose globally relevant clues earlier, initializes promising entry points with query-relevant paragraphs, and reranks grep matches to surface informative excerpts that document-level ranking may otherwise obscure. Across challenging browse question answering and reasoning-intensive retrieval, RARG improves the accuracy--efficiency frontier over retrieval-based and direct-interaction agents. These results demonstrate that relevance-aware interaction enables faster and more reliable search convergence.