Table-as-Search: Agentic Information Seeking is Table Completion

摘要

Current Information Seeking (InfoSeeking) agents struggle to maintain focus and coherence during long-horizon exploration, as tracking search states, including planning procedure and massive search results, within one plain-text context is inherently fragile.To address this, we introduce Table-as-Search (TaS), a structured planning framework that reformulates the InfoSeeking task as a Table Completion task.TaS maps each query into a structured table schema maintained in an external database, where rows represent search candidates and columns denote constraints or required information.This table precisely manages the search states: filled cells strictly record the history and search results, while empty cells serve as an explicit search plan.Crucially, TaS unifies three distinct InfoSeeking tasks: Deep Search, Wide Search, and the challenging DeepWide Search.Extensive experiments demonstrate that TaS significantly outperforms numerous state-of-the-art baselines across three kinds of benchmarks, including multi-agent framework and commercial systems.Furthermore, our analysis validates the TaS’s superior robustness in long-horizon InfoSeeking, alongside its efficiency, scalability and flexibility.Code and datasets are publicly released at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-Search-Agent.