PolitNuggets: Benchmarking Agentic Discovery of Long-Tail Political Facts

摘要

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) embedded in agentic frameworks have transformed information retrieval from static, long-context question answering into open-ended exploration. Yet real-world use requires models to discover and synthesize “long-tail” facts from dispersed sources, a capability that remains under-evaluated. We introduce PolitNuggets, a multilingual benchmark for agentic information synthesis via constructing political biographies for 400 global elites, covering over 10000 political facts. We standardize evaluation with an optimized Supervisor–Searcher multi-agent system and propose FactNet, an evidence-conditional protocol that scores discovery, fine-grained accuracy, and efficiency. Across models and settings, we find that current systems often struggle with fine-grained details, and vary substantially in efficiency. Finally, using benchmark diagnostics, we relate agent performance to underlying model capabilities, highlighting the importance of short-context extraction, multilingual robustness, and reliable tool use.