HiRA: Decoupling Planning and Execution with Hierarchical Reasoning in Deep Search
Abstract
Complex information needs in real-world search scenarios demand deep reasoning and knowledge synthesis across diverse sources, which traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines struggle to address effectively. Current reasoning-based approaches face a key architectural challenge: they employ a single model to handle both high-level planning and detailed execution, resulting in inefficient reasoning and limited scalability. In this paper, we introduce HiRA, a hierarchical framework that separates strategic planning from specialized execution. Our approach decomposes complex search tasks into multiple subtasks, assigns each subtask to a domain-specific agent equipped with external tools and reasoning capabilities, and coordinates the results through a structured integration mechanism. This separation prevents execution details from disrupting high-level reasoning while enabling the system to leverage specialized expertise for different types of information processing. Experiments on four complex, cross-modal deep search benchmarks show that HiRA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RAG and agent-based systems, highlighting the effectiveness of decoupled planning and execution for multi-step information seeking tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/HiRA.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jialong Wu 0007 | 58 | 74 WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 60 WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation 60 Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation |
|
| 2 | Wonduk Seo | 56 | 58 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration 47 Automated Visualization Code Synthesis via Multi-path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimizations (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks 38 A New Query Expansion Approach for Enhancing Information Retrieval via Agent-Mediated Dialogic Inquiry (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
|
| 3 | Kaixin Ma | 52 | 72 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 58 Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games (2023) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration 58 WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Dacheng Tao | 44 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 COI: author | 54 | 15 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian COI: co-author | 47 | 12 papers | |
| Dacheng Tao assigned | 44 | 5 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 43 | 9 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 COI: co-author | 39 | 2 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 39 | 4 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 38 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jialong Wu 0007 assigned | 58 | 3 | 74 WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 60 WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation |
|
| 2 | Wonduk Seo assigned | 56 | 3 | 58 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration 47 Automated Visualization Code Synthesis via Multi-path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimizations (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
|
| 4 | Kaixin Ma assigned | 52 | 3 | 72 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 58 Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games (2023) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration |
|
| 5 | Wenlin Zhang 0001 | 49 | 3 | 74 To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 73 MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG |
|
| 6 | Farzad Shami | 48 | 3 | 59 GROKE: Vision-Free Navigation Instruction Evaluation via Graph Reasoning on OpenStreetMap (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks 38 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
|
| 7 | Xingyu Tan 0001 | 47 | 3 | 55 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning 55 Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
|
| 8 | Haritz Puerto | 47 | 3 | 58 MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA 42 Fine-Tuning on Diverse Reasoning Chains Drives Within-Inference CoT Refinement in LLMs (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision |
|
| 10 | Yingyi Zhang 0001 | 47 | 3 | 73 MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 61 To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG |
|
| 11 | Yu Gu 0016 | 45 | 3 | 61 Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation 56 Middleware for LLMs: Tools Are Instrumental for Language Agents in Complex Environments (2024) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
|
| 14 | Weiwei Sun 0001 COI: co-author | 42 | 3 | 73 Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG 45 ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026) LLM-Based Reranking |
|
| 15 | Ori Yoran | 42 | 3 | 59 AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks? (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks 46 Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
|
| 16 | Chen Zhao 0013 | 41 | 3 | 61 Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation 56 SportReason: Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning across Tables and Text for Sports Question Answering (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning |
|
| 17 | Qinggang Zhang | 41 | 3 | 54 You Don't Need Pre-Built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 42 Knapsack Optimization-Based Schema Linking for LLM-Based Text-to-SQL Generation (2026) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
|
| 18 | Mariano Barone | 41 | 3 | 58 SOLVE-Med: Specialized Orchestration for Leading Vertical Experts Across Medical Specialties (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA 40 Combining Evidence and Reasoning for Biomedical Fact-Checking (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
|
| 19 | Qisheng Hu | 41 | 3 | 55 Coordinating Search-Informed Reasoning and Reasoning-Guided Search in Claim Verification (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification 42 Just What You Desire: Constrained Timeline Summarization with Self-Reflection for Enhanced Relevance (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
|
| 20 | Yong Li 0004 | 41 | 3 | 73 PG-Agent: An Agent Powered by Page Graph (2025) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration 47 ProBench: Benchmarking GUI Agents with Accurate Process Information (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
|
| 21 | Shuaiqiang Wang COI: co-author | 41 | 3 | 73 Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 60 Thinking Forward and Backward: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning |
|
| 22 | Archiki Prasad | 41 | 3 | 56 MAgICoRe: Multi-Agent, Iterative, Coarse-to-Fine Refinement for Reasoning (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision 47 ReCEval: Evaluating Reasoning Chains via Correctness and Informativeness (2023) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
|
| 23 | Ben Liu 0002 | 40 | 3 | 59 MoodAngels: A Retrieval-augmented Multi-agent Framework for Psychiatry Diagnosis (2025) RAG for Domain Applications 52 SymAgent: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Learning Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
|
| 24 | Xi Ye 0003 | 40 | 3 | 61 Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation 47 MuSR: Testing the Limits of Chain-of-thought with Multistep Soft Reasoning (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
|
| 25 | Nancy F. Chen | 40 | 3 | 58 Multi-expert Prompting Improves Reliability, Safety and Usefulness of Large Language Models (2024) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration 43 Learning Planning-based Reasoning by Trajectories Collection and Process Reward Synthesizing (2024) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision |
|
| 26 | Weizhou Shen | 40 | 3 | 59 Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks 58 Mobile-Agent-v2: Mobile Device Operation Assistant with Effective Navigation via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration |
|
| 27 | Daiting Shi COI: co-author | 40 | 3 | 46 Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026) RL Training of Search Agents 42 A Question-Oriented Propagation Network for News Reading Comprehension (2022) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
|
| 28 | Shu Zhou 0002 | 40 | 3 | 59 SCORE-RAG: Self-Correcting Exploration-Exploitation Retrieval for Multi-hop Question Answering (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 54 DynKGRAG: A framework for dynamic knowledge graph construction and multi-hop querying over numerical and textual data (2026) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning |
|
| 29 | Wenyu Huang | 40 | 3 | 43 Prompting large language models with knowledge graphs for question answering involving long-tail facts (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning 42 Masking in Multi-hop QA: An Analysis of How Language Models Perform with Context Permutation (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
|
| 31 | Keqin Bao | 39 | 3 | 59 Teaching Language Models to Reason with Tools (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks 47 MTR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Turn Reasoning Evaluation (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks |
|
| 32 | Farima Fatahi Bayat | 39 | 3 | 45 From Proof to Program: Characterizing Tool-Induced Reasoning Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision 35 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification |
|
| 34 | Qingyi Si | 39 | 3 | 43 S-GRPO: Early Exit via Reinforcement Learning in Reasoning Models (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision 42 Test-time Prompt Intervention (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision |
|
| 35 | Jinheon Baek | 39 | 3 | 56 Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity (2024) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 42 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
|
| 36 | Jiapu Wang | 39 | 3 | 56 Decomposing and Revising What Language Models Generate (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning 56 Atomic Fact Decomposition Helps Attributed Question Answering (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning |