InteractComp: Evaluating Search Agents With Ambiguous Queries

arXiv:2510.24668v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in web search and information retrieval. However, many search-agent benchmarks assume that user queries are complete and unambiguous. This assumption leaves under-tested a practical failure mode: agents may face ambiguous requests where the intended target cannot be identified without clarification. Yet most agents lack interactive mechanisms during the search process, and existing benchmarks cannot assess this capability. To address this gap, we introduce InteractComp, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether search agents can recognize query ambiguity and actively interact to resolve it during search. Following the principle of easy to verify, interact to disambiguate, we construct 210 expert-curated questions across 9 domains through a target-distractor methodology that creates controlled ambiguity resolvable only through interaction. Evaluation of 17 models reveals striking failure: the best model achieves only 13.73% accuracy despite 71.50% with complete context, exposing systematic overconfidence rather than reasoning deficits. Forced interaction produces dramatic gains, demonstrating latent capability current strategies fail to engage. Longitudinal analysis shows interaction capabilities stagnated over 15 months while search performance improved seven-fold, revealing a critical blind spot. This stagnation, coupled with the immediate feedback inherent to search tasks, makes InteractComp a valuable resource for both evaluating and training interaction capabilities in search agents. The code is available at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/InteractComp.

Abstract:Language agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in web search and information retrieval. However, many search-agent benchmarks assume that user queries are complete and unambiguous. This assumption leaves under-tested a practical failure mode: agents may face ambiguous requests where the intended target cannot be identified without clarification. Yet most agents lack interactive mechanisms during the search process, and existing benchmarks cannot assess this capability. To address this gap, we introduce InteractComp, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether search agents can recognize query ambiguity and actively interact to resolve it during search. Following the principle of easy to verify, interact to disambiguate, we construct 210 expert-curated questions across 9 domains through a target-distractor methodology that creates controlled ambiguity resolvable only through interaction. Evaluation of 17 models reveals striking failure: the best model achieves only 13.73% accuracy despite 71.50% with complete context, exposing systematic overconfidence rather than reasoning deficits. Forced interaction produces dramatic gains, demonstrating latent capability current strategies fail to engage. Longitudinal analysis shows interaction capabilities stagnated over 15 months while search performance improved seven-fold, revealing a critical blind spot. This stagnation, coupled with the immediate feedback inherent to search tasks, makes InteractComp a valuable resource for both evaluating and training interaction capabilities in search agents. The code is available at this https URL.

Accepted at the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), Seoul, South Korea. 9 pages, 4 figures

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2510.24668 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2510.24668v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

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InteractComp: Evaluating Search Agents With Ambiguous Queries

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