arXiv subjects

Jihyuk Kim

Publications and source records attributed to Jihyuk Kim.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Adaptive Retrieval for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval

We study leveraging adaptive retrieval to ensure sufficient "bridge" documents are retrieved for reasoning-intensive retrieval. Bridge documents are those that contribute to the reasoning process yet are not directly relevant to the initial query. While existing reasoning-based reranker pipelines attempt to surface these documents in ranking, they suffer from bounded recall. Naive solution with adaptive retrieval into these pipelines often leads to planning error propagation. To address this, we propose REPAIR, a framework that bridges this gap by repurposing reasoning plans as dense feedback signals for adaptive retrieval. Our key distinction is enabling mid-course correction during reranking through selective adaptive retrieval, retrieving documents that support the pivotal plan. Experimental results on reasoning-intensive retrieval and complex QA tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines by 5.6%pt.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

When Is Enough Not Enough? Illusory Completion in Search Agents

Recent search agents leverage multi-turn reasoning and search tools to achieve strong performance on multi-hop and long-horizon benchmarks. Yet it remains unclear whether they reliably reason across all requirements by tracking, verifying, and maintaining multiple conditions in these questions. We study this capability under multi-constraint problems, where valid answers must satisfy several constraints simultaneously. We find that illusory completion frequently occurs, wherein agents believe tasks are complete despite unresolved or violated constraints, leading to underverified answers. To diagnose this behavior, we introduce the Epistemic Ledger, an evaluation framework that tracks evidential support and agents' beliefs for each constraint throughout multi-turn reasoning. Our analysis reveals four recurring failure patterns: bare assertions, overlooked refutations, stagnation, and premature exit. Motivated by these findings, we examine whether explicit constraint-state tracking during execution mitigates these failures via LiveLedger, an inference-time tracker. This simple intervention consistently improves performance, substantially reducing underverified answers (by up to 26.5%) and improving overall accuracy (by up to 11.6%) on multi-constraint problems.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Hybrid Deep Searcher: Scalable Parallel and Sequential Search Reasoning

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, we find that existing approaches rarely demonstrate test-time search scaling. Methods that extend reasoning through single-query sequential search suffer from limited evidence coverage, while approaches that generate multiple independent queries per step often lack structured aggregation, hindering deeper sequential reasoning. We propose a hybrid search strategy to address these limitations. We introduce HybridDeepSearcher, a structured search agent that integrates parallel query expansion with explicit evidence aggregation before advancing to deeper sequential reasoning. To supervise this behavior, we introduce HDS-QA, a novel dataset that guides models to combine broad parallel search with structured aggregation through supervised reasoning-query0retrieval trajectories containing parallel sub-queries. Across five benchmarks, HybridDeepSearcher significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, improving F1 scores by +15.9 on FanOutQA and +9.2 on a subset of BrowseComp. Further analysis shows its consistent test-time search scaling: performance improves as additional search turns or calls are allowed, while competing methods plateau.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

One Missing Piece for Open-Source Reasoning Models: A Dataset to Mitigate Cold-Starting Short CoT LLMs in RL

With the release of R1, a publicly available large reasoning model (LRM), researchers commonly train new LRMs by training language models on R1's long chain-of-thought (CoT) inferences. While prior works show that LRMs' capabilities can be reproduced through direct distillation, the continued reliance on the existing models (e.g., R1) remains a critical limitation in advancing the field. As a first step toward independent LRM development, this paper explores the possibility of constructing a long CoT dataset with LLMs that are not trained for inference-time scaling. To this end, we present the Long CoT Collection, a dataset of 100K CoT rationales annotated using existing short CoT LLMs. We develop a pipeline that induces o1's novel reasoning strategies into short CoT LLMs, enabling them to think longer and introducing controllability over the thought budget to better manage the overthinking problem. Our extensive analyses validate that our dataset achieves quality comparable to--or slightly below--R1. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that training on our dataset not only strengthens general reasoning skills, but also provides a strong foundation for reinforcement learning--models initialized on our data achieve 2-3x larger gains with RLVR.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Collective Relevance Labeling for Passage Retrieval

Deep learning for Information Retrieval (IR) requires a large amount of high-quality query-document relevance labels, but such labels are inherently sparse. Label smoothing redistributes some observed probability mass over unobserved instances, often uniformly, uninformed of the true distribution. In contrast, we propose knowledge distillation for informed labeling, without incurring high computation overheads at evaluation time. Our contribution is designing a simple but efficient teacher model which utilizes collective knowledge, to outperform state-of-the-arts distilled from a more complex teacher model. Specifically, we train up to x8 faster than the state-of-the-art teacher, while distilling the rankings better. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jihyukkim-nlp/CollectiveKD

cs.IR↗