Varun Gandhi
Author directory2026
GRASP: GRanularity-Aware Search Policy for Agentic RAG
Varun Gandhi | Jaewook Lee | Shantanu Todmal | Franck Dernoncourt | Ryan A. Rossi | Andrew Lan | Zichao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Varun Gandhi | Jaewook Lee | Shantanu Todmal | Franck Dernoncourt | Ryan A. Rossi | Andrew Lan | Zichao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends RAG by allowing language models to iteratively reason, generate search queries, retrieve evidence, and predict answers. However, it remains challenging for models to decide when to retrieve, whether to use lexical matching or semantic similarity, and how to control context granularity to prevent irrelevant tokens from interfering with agent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce GRASP, a reinforcement learning framework for training agents to adaptively coordinate complementary retrieval tools during multi-step reasoning. GRASP provides the agent with semantic search, keyword search, and paragraph-reading actions, enabling it to retrieve sentence-level evidence and expand context only when needed. We train the policy with a reward that accounts for answer accuracy, grounded reading, complementary search, and turn efficiency. Experiments on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks across 3B and 7B models show that GRASP improves retrieval and question answering performance compared with single-step retrieval and multi-step agentic RAG baselines. Qualitative and ablation analyses show that the learned policy develops interpretable skimming and scanning behavior: it uses semantic search for broad exploration, paragraph reading for local verification, and keyword search for entity-specific evidence. These results suggest that learning to coordinate retrieval signals and context granularity is critical for agent’s reasoning.