@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-inertia,
title = "From Inertia to Objectivity: Improving Deep Research Agents with Noise Isolation",
author = "Zhang, Xiangxin and
Zhang, Zhanwei and
Fu, Zhihang and
Lin, Binbin and
Wang, Wenxiao",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1860/",
pages = "42282--42301",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Web search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong promise, but deep research tasks expose a recurring failure mode: once an agent has produced a query, plan, or intermediate conclusion, it becomes less objective when later judging the consequences of that same action. We term this phenomenon inertia bias. To make it measurable, we introduce the IBIS benchmark, which controls the search observations while varying whether the model is evaluating the outcome of its own prior action. We find that models are substantially worse when they ``own'' the preceding search step, showing that self-authored action history can systematically distort subsequent judgment. We further show that this bias propagates into two forms of system-level degradation: search noise at the worker level and contextual noise at the manager level. To address this problem, we propose NIS-Agent, which applies context isolation at the two decision points most vulnerable to inertia bias: webpage triage and final-answer validation. Across GAIA, WebWalkerQA, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-zh, NIS-Agent achieves competitive performance while reducing token cost by 33{\%} compared to our baseline. We further train an 8B model to be intrinsically more resistant to inertia bias; under the same NIS-Agent framework, it attains average performance comparable to GPT-4o on deep research benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/PangSMPang/NIS-Agent."
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<abstract>Web search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong promise, but deep research tasks expose a recurring failure mode: once an agent has produced a query, plan, or intermediate conclusion, it becomes less objective when later judging the consequences of that same action. We term this phenomenon inertia bias. To make it measurable, we introduce the IBIS benchmark, which controls the search observations while varying whether the model is evaluating the outcome of its own prior action. We find that models are substantially worse when they “own” the preceding search step, showing that self-authored action history can systematically distort subsequent judgment. We further show that this bias propagates into two forms of system-level degradation: search noise at the worker level and contextual noise at the manager level. To address this problem, we propose NIS-Agent, which applies context isolation at the two decision points most vulnerable to inertia bias: webpage triage and final-answer validation. Across GAIA, WebWalkerQA, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-zh, NIS-Agent achieves competitive performance while reducing token cost by 33% compared to our baseline. We further train an 8B model to be intrinsically more resistant to inertia bias; under the same NIS-Agent framework, it attains average performance comparable to GPT-4o on deep research benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/PangSMPang/NIS-Agent.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T From Inertia to Objectivity: Improving Deep Research Agents with Noise Isolation
%A Zhang, Xiangxin
%A Zhang, Zhanwei
%A Fu, Zhihang
%A Lin, Binbin
%A Wang, Wenxiao
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F zhang-etal-2026-inertia
%X Web search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong promise, but deep research tasks expose a recurring failure mode: once an agent has produced a query, plan, or intermediate conclusion, it becomes less objective when later judging the consequences of that same action. We term this phenomenon inertia bias. To make it measurable, we introduce the IBIS benchmark, which controls the search observations while varying whether the model is evaluating the outcome of its own prior action. We find that models are substantially worse when they “own” the preceding search step, showing that self-authored action history can systematically distort subsequent judgment. We further show that this bias propagates into two forms of system-level degradation: search noise at the worker level and contextual noise at the manager level. To address this problem, we propose NIS-Agent, which applies context isolation at the two decision points most vulnerable to inertia bias: webpage triage and final-answer validation. Across GAIA, WebWalkerQA, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-zh, NIS-Agent achieves competitive performance while reducing token cost by 33% compared to our baseline. We further train an 8B model to be intrinsically more resistant to inertia bias; under the same NIS-Agent framework, it attains average performance comparable to GPT-4o on deep research benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/PangSMPang/NIS-Agent.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1860/
%P 42282-42301
Markdown (Informal)
[From Inertia to Objectivity: Improving Deep Research Agents with Noise Isolation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1860/) (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL