VibeSearchBench: Benchmarking Long-horizon Proactive Search in the Wild
:::info Stub — Full Engineering Breakdown Coming This paper was featured on Hugging Face Daily Papers on 2026-05-27 with 12 upvotes. A full breakdown with production viability rating, implementation notes, and honest limitations is being written. Subscribe to AI Letters → :::
| Authors | Xiaohongshu Inc |
| Year | 2026 |
| HF Upvotes | 12 |
| arXiv | 2605.27882 |
| Download | |
| HF Page | View on Hugging Face |
Abstract
LLM-based agents score well on search benchmarks, yet real users consistently find results unsatisfying, revealing a persistent evaluation-experience gap. We attribute this gap to existing benchmarks' reliance on over-specified queries, single-turn interactions, and fixed-schema evaluation, none of which reflect real search behavior where users and agents collaboratively refine vague intent through multi-turn dialogue. We term this paradigm VibeSearch and introduce VibeSearchBench, a benchmark comprising 200 manually curated bilingual (Chinese and English) tasks across 20 domains, split into VibeSearch-Pro (professional) and VibeSearch-Daily (daily-life) subsets. Each task pairs a user persona with a schema-free ground-truth knowledge graph, and is evaluated through a progressive-disclosure user simulator and a graph-matching evaluation framework. We benchmark seven frontier models under both the ReAct framework and the OpenClaw agent harness. Results show that all models remain substantially inadequate for VibeSearch (best F1: 30.30), highlighting the need for fundamental advances in long-context reasoning, proactive intent elicitation, and structured knowledge construction.
Engineering Breakdown
The Problem
LLM-based agents score well on search benchmarks, yet real users consistently find results unsatisfying, revealing a persistent evaluation-experience gap. We attribute this gap to existing benchmarks' reliance on over-specified queries, single-turn interactions, and fixed-schema evaluation, none of which reflect real search behavior where users and agents collaboratively refine vague intent through multi-turn dialogue.
The Approach
We attribute this gap to existing benchmarks' reliance on over-specified queries, single-turn interactions, and fixed-schema evaluation, none of which reflect real search behavior where users and agents collaboratively refine vague intent through multi-turn dialogue.
Key Results
Results show that all models remain substantially inadequate for VibeSearch (best F1: 30.30), highlighting the need for fundamental advances in long-context reasoning, proactive intent elicitation, and structured knowledge construction.
Research Areas
This paper contributes to the following areas of AI/ML engineering:
- Machine learning
- Deep learning
- Neural networks
- Model optimization
- AI systems
- Vibesearchbench
:::tip Subscribe Get weekly breakdowns of papers like this in AI Letters - the newsletter for engineers building production AI systems. :::
