Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external retrieval. However, they often over-search – unnecessarily invoking search tool even when it does not improve response quality, which leads to computational inefficiency and hallucinations by incorporating irrelevant context. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation of over-searching across multiple dimensions, including query types, model categories, retrieval conditions, and multi-turn conversations. Our findings show: (i) search generally improves answer accuracy on answerable queries but harms abstention on unanswerable ones; (ii) over-searching is more pronounced in complex reasoning models and deep research systems, is exacerbated by noisy retrieval, and compounds across turns in multi-turn conversations; and (iii) the composition of retrieved evidence is crucial, as the presence of negative evidence improves abstention. To quantify over-searching, we introduce Tokens Per Correctness (TPC), an evaluation metric that captures the performance-cost trade-off for search-augmented LLMs. Lastly, we investigate mitigation approaches at both the query and retrieval levels and release the OverSearchQA benchmark to foster continued research into efficient search-augmented LLMs.

For automatic speech translation (AST), end-to-end approaches are outperformed by cascaded models that transcribe with automatic speech recognition (ASR), then trans- late with machine translation (MT). A major cause of the performance gap is that, while existing AST corpora are small, massive datasets exist for both the ASR and MT subsystems. In this work, we evaluate several data augmentation and pretraining approaches for AST, by comparing all on the same datasets. Simple data augmentation by translating ASR transcripts proves most effective on the English–French augmented LibriSpeech dataset, closing the performance gap from 8.2 to 1.4 BLEU, compared to a very strong cascade that could directly utilize copious ASR and MT data. The same end-to-end approach plus fine-tuning closes the gap on the English–Romanian MuST-C dataset from 6.7 to 3.7 BLEU. In addition to these results, we present practical rec- ommendations for augmentation and pretraining approaches. Finally, we decrease the performance gap to 0.01 BLEU us- ing a Transformer-based architecture.