@inproceedings{xue-etal-2026-fake,
title = "Fake It Till You Make It: Training Deep-Search Agents in Synthetic Search Environments",
author = "Xue, Yibo and
Zheng, Pin and
Wang, Chengyu and
Kang, Yukun and
Lyu, Yuanjie and
Wang, Ming and
Peng, Jian and
Huang, Jun and
Xu, Changliang",
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.928/",
pages = "21347--21372",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Deep-search agents are commonly trained via repeated interaction with real-world search APIs and browser environments. While realistic, this paradigm is expensive, difficult to reproduce, and sensitive to external drift. Existing simulator-based alternatives reduce dependence on live retrieval, but they largely inherit task distributions from pre-existing QA datasets, limiting their alignment with the behaviors required for deep search. We introduce SynSearch, a framework for training deep-search agents entirely within a synthetic search{--}browse environment. Our core idea is to jointly design the environment and the training-task distribution, enabling the synthesis of environment-aligned tasks and reinforcement learning of compact language models in multi-turn search settings. By grounding task validity in executable environment trajectories rather than surface-level plausibility alone, SynSearch unifies task generation, trajectory verification, and policy optimization within a low-marginal-cost and reproducible framework. Experiments on multi-hop QA and deep-search benchmarks show that SynSearch consistently improves both answer accuracy and search behavior, with especially large gains on deep-search tasks. Moreover, SynSearch offers low marginal cost, reproducibility, controllability, and strong performance under real-search evaluation, highlighting synthetic environments as an effective substrate for training deep-search agents."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="xue-etal-2026-fake">
<titleInfo>
<title>Fake It Till You Make It: Training Deep-Search Agents in Synthetic Search Environments</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yibo</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xue</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Pin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zheng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Chengyu</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yukun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Kang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yuanjie</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lyu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ming</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Peng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Huang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Changliang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-459-0</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Deep-search agents are commonly trained via repeated interaction with real-world search APIs and browser environments. While realistic, this paradigm is expensive, difficult to reproduce, and sensitive to external drift. Existing simulator-based alternatives reduce dependence on live retrieval, but they largely inherit task distributions from pre-existing QA datasets, limiting their alignment with the behaviors required for deep search. We introduce SynSearch, a framework for training deep-search agents entirely within a synthetic search–browse environment. Our core idea is to jointly design the environment and the training-task distribution, enabling the synthesis of environment-aligned tasks and reinforcement learning of compact language models in multi-turn search settings. By grounding task validity in executable environment trajectories rather than surface-level plausibility alone, SynSearch unifies task generation, trajectory verification, and policy optimization within a low-marginal-cost and reproducible framework. Experiments on multi-hop QA and deep-search benchmarks show that SynSearch consistently improves both answer accuracy and search behavior, with especially large gains on deep-search tasks. Moreover, SynSearch offers low marginal cost, reproducibility, controllability, and strong performance under real-search evaluation, highlighting synthetic environments as an effective substrate for training deep-search agents.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">xue-etal-2026-fake</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.928/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>21347</start>
<end>21372</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Fake It Till You Make It: Training Deep-Search Agents in Synthetic Search Environments
%A Xue, Yibo
%A Zheng, Pin
%A Wang, Chengyu
%A Kang, Yukun
%A Lyu, Yuanjie
%A Wang, Ming
%A Peng, Jian
%A Huang, Jun
%A Xu, Changliang
%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 xue-etal-2026-fake
%X Deep-search agents are commonly trained via repeated interaction with real-world search APIs and browser environments. While realistic, this paradigm is expensive, difficult to reproduce, and sensitive to external drift. Existing simulator-based alternatives reduce dependence on live retrieval, but they largely inherit task distributions from pre-existing QA datasets, limiting their alignment with the behaviors required for deep search. We introduce SynSearch, a framework for training deep-search agents entirely within a synthetic search–browse environment. Our core idea is to jointly design the environment and the training-task distribution, enabling the synthesis of environment-aligned tasks and reinforcement learning of compact language models in multi-turn search settings. By grounding task validity in executable environment trajectories rather than surface-level plausibility alone, SynSearch unifies task generation, trajectory verification, and policy optimization within a low-marginal-cost and reproducible framework. Experiments on multi-hop QA and deep-search benchmarks show that SynSearch consistently improves both answer accuracy and search behavior, with especially large gains on deep-search tasks. Moreover, SynSearch offers low marginal cost, reproducibility, controllability, and strong performance under real-search evaluation, highlighting synthetic environments as an effective substrate for training deep-search agents.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.928/
%P 21347-21372
Markdown (Informal)
[Fake It Till You Make It: Training Deep-Search Agents in Synthetic Search Environments](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.928/) (Xue et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Yibo Xue, Pin Zheng, Chengyu Wang, Yukun Kang, Yuanjie Lyu, Ming Wang, Jian Peng, Jun Huang, and Changliang Xu. 2026. Fake It Till You Make It: Training Deep-Search Agents in Synthetic Search Environments. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 21347–21372, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.