EAV: Evidence Anchoring and Verification for Reliable Agentic Search

Agentic search systems can return incorrect answers even after retrieving relevant evidence, a pattern we trace to three failure modes: evidence blindness, where retrieved documents go uninspected or are used ineffectively; verification failure, where self-review reconsiders existing reasoning without new falsifying evidence; and error propagation, where erroneous intermediate conclusions are reused downstream. Existing remedies either re-examine the agent's own reasoning or seek agreement across multiple complete runs; the former lacks new evidence, and the latter multiplies cost. We propose the Evidence Anchoring–Verification (EAV) framework. During execution, EAV archives raw tool observations and anchors the claims adopted by the executor, together with their sources and conflicts, into a compact evidence chain; before an answer is delivered, an independent tool-calling verifier re-checks high-risk premises against fresh evidence. A rejected candidate triggers diagnosis-guided re-execution that inherits the evidence memory; EAV-Flash and EAV-MAS apply this loop at the task level and at subtask handoffs, respectively. Across nine matched-backbone settings on GAIA (text-only validation), xBench-DeepSearch, and BrowseComp-ZH, EAV-Flash ranks among the leading methods in every setting and attains an average success rate of 82.64%, 3.69 points above MiroFlow, the previous state-of-the-art system, while using 56.1–72.4% fewer tokens; EAV-MAS reaches 80.91%, a 1.96-point gain over the same baseline. With DeepSeek-V4-Flash, EAV-Flash sets the open-source state of the art on xBench-DeepSearch (89.00%) and the state of the art on BrowseComp-Plus (92.89%). On a BrowseComp-Plus subset, archiving, anchoring, and verification contribute gains of 5.8, 7.1, and 7.8 points; anchoring mainly raises error-interception recall, and verification-driven sparse retries offer a better performance–cost trade-off than majority voting and can be combined with voting for further gains.