Hamed Zamani
Publications
GrepSeek: Training Search Agents for Direct Corpus Interaction
Large Language Model (LLM) search agents have shown strong promise for knowledge-intensive language tasks through multiple rounds of reasoning and information retrieval. Most existing systems access information using a retriever that takes a keyword or natural language query and returns a ranked list of documents using an index of pre-computed document representations. In this work, we explore a complementary perspective in which the search agent treats the corpus itself as the search environment and finds evidence by issuing executable shell commands. We introduce GrepSeek, an optimized direct corpus interaction (DCI) search agent that trains a compact search agent to find, filter, and compose evidence from large text corpora. To address the instability of learning behavior directly with reinforcement learning on large corpora, we propose a two-stage training pipeline. First, we construct a cold-start dataset using an answer-aware Tutor and answer-blind Planner to generate verified, causally grounded search trajectories. Second, we refine the initialized policy with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), allowing the agent to improve its task-oriented search behavior through direct interaction with the corpus. To make DCI practical at scale, we further use a semantics-preserving sharded-parallel execution engine that accelerates shell-based retrieval by up to $7.6\times$ while preserving byte-exact equivalence with sequential execution of the shell command. Experiments across seven open-domain question answering benchmarks show that GrepSeek achieves the strongest overall token-level $F_1$ and Exact Match. Our analysis also highlights the limitations of purely lexical interaction on queries with substantial surface-form variation, suggesting DCI as a practical and competitive method for search agents that can complement existing retrieval paradigms in the real world.
Learning to Reason for Multi-Step Retrieval of Personal Context in Personalized Question Answering
Personalization in Question Answering (QA) requires answers that are both accurate and aligned with users' background, preferences, and historical context. Existing state-of-the-art methods primarily rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions that construct personal context by retrieving relevant items from the user's profile. Existing methods use the user's query directly to retrieve personal documents, and such strategies often lead to surface-level personalization. We propose PR2 (Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning), a reinforcement learning framework that integrates reasoning and retrieval from personal context for personalization. PR2 learns adaptive retrieval-reasoning policies, determining when to retrieve, what evidence to retrieve from user profiles, and how to incorporate it into intermediate reasoning steps. By optimizing multi-turn reasoning trajectories under a personalized reward function, the framework reinforces reasoning paths that better align with user-specific preferences and contextual signals reflected by the reward model. Extensive experiments on the LaMP-QA benchmark using three LLMs show that PR2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average relative improvement of 8.8%-12% in personalized QA.
Improving User Privacy in Personalized Generation: Client-Side Retrieval-Augmented Modification of Server-Side Generated Speculations
Personalization is crucial for aligning Large Language Model (LLM) outputs with individual user preferences and background knowledge. State-of-the-art solutions are based on retrieval augmentation, where relevant context from a user profile is retrieved for LLM consumption. These methods deal with a trade-off between exposing retrieved private data to cloud providers and relying on less capable local models. We introduce $P^3$, an interactive framework for high-quality personalization without revealing private profiles to server-side LLMs. In $P^3$, a large server-side model generates a sequence of $k$ draft tokens based solely on the user query, while a small client-side model, with retrieval access to the user's private profile, evaluates and modifies these drafts to better reflect user preferences. This process repeats until an end token is generated. Experiments on LaMP-QA, a recent benchmark consisting of three personalized question answering datasets, show that $P^3$ consistently outperforms both non-personalized server-side and personalized client-side baselines, achieving statistically significant improvements of $7.4%$ to $9%$ on average. Importantly, $P^3$ recovers $90.3%$ to $95.7%$ of the utility of a ``leaky'' upper-bound scenario in which the full profile is exposed to the large server-side model. Privacy analyses, including linkability and attribute inference attacks, indicate that $P^3$ preserves the privacy of a non-personalized server-side model, introducing only marginal additional leakage ($1.5%$--$3.5%$) compared to submitting a query without any personal context. Additionally, the framework is efficient for edge deployment, with the client-side model generating only $9.2%$ of the total tokens. These results demonstrate that $P^3$ provides a practical, effective solution for personalized generation with improved privacy.