arXiv:2604.03675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In agentic search, large language models (LLMs) are trained to perform multi-turn retrieval and reasoning for complex tasks such as multi-hop question answering (QA). However, current search-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods suffer from two core limitations: expensive long-horizon rollouts are under-utilized during training, and supervision is typically available only at the final answer, resulting in severe reward sparsity. We present Prefix-based Rollout reuse for Agentic search with Intermediate Step rEwards (PRAISE), a framework for improving both data efficiency and credit assignment in agentic search training. Given a complete search trajectory, PRAISE extracts prefix states at different search turns, elicits intermediate answers from them, and uses these prefixes both to construct additional training trajectories and to derive step-level rewards from performance differences across prefixes. Our method uses a single shared model for both search policy learning and prefix answer evaluation, enabling joint optimization without extra human annotations or a separate reward model. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks show that PRAISE consistently improves performance over strong baselines.

arXiv:2512.13168v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce FinWorkBench (a.k.a. Finch), a benchmark for evaluating agents on real-world, enterprise-grade finance and accounting workflows that interleave data entry, structuring, formatting, web search, cross-file retrieval, calculation, modeling, validation, translation, visualization, and reporting. Finch is built from authentic enterprise workspaces from Enron (15,000 files and 500,000 emails) and other financial institutions spanning 2000 to 2025, preserving the in-the-wild messiness of multimodal artifacts such as tables and charts across diverse domains including budgeting, trading, and asset management. We propose a workflow construction process that combines LLM-assisted mining of workflows from authentic enterprise environments with expert annotation. Specifically, we use LLM-assisted, expert-verified derivation of workflows from real-world email threads and spreadsheet version histories, followed by meticulous workflow annotation requiring more than 700 hours of expert effort. This process yields 172 composite workflows with 384 tasks, involving 1,710 spreadsheets with 27 million cells, along with PDFs and other artifacts, capturing the intrinsically messy, long-horizon, knowledge-intensive, and collaborative nature of enterprise work. We conduct both human and automated evaluations of frontier AI systems, including GPT 5.1, Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4, and Qwen 3 Max. GPT 5.1 Pro spends an average of 16.8 minutes per workflow yet passes only 38.4% of workflows. Comprehensive case studies further highlight the challenges that real-world enterprise workflows pose for AI agents.