GrepSeek: Training Search Agents for Direct Corpus Interaction

Large Language Model (LLM) search agents have shown strong promise on knowledge-intensive tasks through iterative reasoning and retrieval. Most existing systems rely on retrievers that return ranked documents from a pre-built index. We explore a complementary paradigm in which the agent treats the corpus as the search environment and finds evidence through executable shell commands. We introduce GrepSeek, an optimized direct corpus interaction (DCI) agent that learns to find, filter, and compose evidence over large text corpora. To stabilize reinforcement learning (RL) over large corpora, we train in two stages: first, we initialize the policy using verified, causally grounded search trajectories generated by an answer-aware Tutor and an answer-blind Planner; then, we refine the policy using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). To make DCI practical at scale, we introduce two semantics-preserving execution optimizations: Pruned Adaptive Command Execution, which reduces shell-based search latency by up to 77× on a 14 GB corpus with 21 million documents using a compact auxiliary structure, and Sharded-Parallel Corpus Search, which achieves up to 7.6× speedup without additional preprocessing; both preserve equivalence with sequential execution. Across eight open-domain QA benchmarks, GrepSeek achieves the strongest overall performance, with a statistically significant relative improvement of 5.7% over the best baseline. Our analysis shows how DCI-optimized agents conduct flexible and effective compositional search through direct corpus interaction.