WideSeek-R1: Exploring Width Scaling for Broad Information Seeking via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have largely focused on depth scaling, where a single agent solves long-horizon problems with multi-turn reasoning and tool use. However, as tasks grow broader, the key bottleneck shifts from individual competence to organizational capability. In this work, we explore a complementary dimension of width scaling with multi-agent systems to address broad information seeking. Existing multi-agent systems often rely on hand-crafted workflows and turn-taking interactions that fail to parallelize work effectively. To bridge this gap, we propose WideSeek-R1, a lead-agent-subagent framework trained via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to synergize scalable orchestration and parallel execution. By utilizing a shared LLM with isolated contexts and specialized tools, WideSeek-R1 jointly optimizes the lead agent and parallel subagents on a curated dataset of 20k broad information-seeking tasks. Extensive experiments show that WideSeek-R1-4B achieves an item F1 score of 40.0% on the WideSearch benchmark, which is comparable to the performance of single-agent DeepSeek-R1-671B. Furthermore, WideSeek-R1-4B exhibits consistent performance gains as the number of parallel subagents increases, highlighting the effectiveness of width scaling.
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Zelai Xu
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2026-02-05T10:54:21.312Z
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Zelai Xu
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Zhexuan Xu
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Ruize Zhang
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2026-02-05T10:54:19.167Z
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Ruize Zhang
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Ruize-Zhang
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Chunyang Zhu
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Shi Yu
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Weilin Liu
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Quanlu Zhang
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Wenbo Ding
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Chao Yu
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2026-02-06T18:55:54.054Z
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Chao Yu
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Yu Wang
WideSeek-R1: Exploring Width Scaling for Broad Information Seeking via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have largely focused on depth scaling, where a single agent solves long-horizon problems with multi-turn reasoning and tool use. However, as tasks grow broader, the key bottleneck shifts from individual competence to organizational capability. In this work, we explore a complementary dimension of width scaling with multi-agent systems to address broad information seeking. Existing multi-agent systems often rely on hand-crafted workflows and turn-taking interactions that fail to parallelize work effectively. To bridge this gap, we propose WideSeek-R1, a lead-agent-subagent framework trained via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to synergize scalable orchestration and parallel execution. By utilizing a shared LLM with isolated contexts and specialized tools, WideSeek-R1 jointly optimizes the lead agent and parallel subagents on a curated dataset of 20k broad information-seeking tasks. Extensive experiments show that WideSeek-R1-4B achieves an item F1 score of 40.0% on the WideSearch benchmark, which is comparable to the performance of single-agent DeepSeek-R1-671B. Furthermore, WideSeek-R1-4B exhibits consistent performance gains as the number of parallel subagents increases, highlighting the effectiveness of width scaling.
Multi-agent systems using reinforcement learning enable parallel information seeking with scalable orchestration, achieving performance comparable to larger single agents.
Large Language Models multi-agent systems multi-agent reinforcement learning lead-agent-subagent framework parallel execution information seeking WideSearch benchmark F1 score