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Public story · 2026-08-26 · high
Crase replaces the agent loop with a fixed 1.5-hop citation walk, cutting compute to about a third of rivals' cost.
Why now: Crase's arXiv paper is a rare head-to-head measurement of agent autonomy against a narrower, fixed alternative.
A new retrieval system called Crase skips the agent loop for scholarly search. It was tested against deep research agents on proprietary models over a 500K-paper arXiv corpus. It delivered up to 3x the recall@50 at about a third of the cost.
Rather than turning a language model loose to search, read, and judge relevance on its own, it runs four fixed steps. One search-engine query pulls seed papers. The system then expands 1.5 hops through the citation graph and prunes any citation edge whose claim lacks entailment support. What's left gets ranked by a recency-aware random walk.
The candidate set, the reason each paper survives pruning, and the stopping condition are all decided in advance. Someone can trace exactly why a given paper made the cut.
That's a direct hit on the assumption that more agent autonomy always means better search. Citation graphs already encode the relationships a literature search needs, so an agent rediscovering that structure step by step burns tokens without adding accuracy. Anyone building retrieval over a corpus with known relationships, citations, imports, dependency graphs, should ask a question first. Is an open-ended agent solving a problem a fixed traversal already handles?
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Both cover When; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (against, agent).
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Both cover Against; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (against, agent).
Shared entity: When / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Both cover When; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (against, agent).
Shared entity: When / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Both cover When; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); overlapping topics (against, candidate, cost).
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Both cover When; reported by the same outlet (arxiv.org); earlier When coverage from 2026-08-10.
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