DeepStress

DeepStress: A stress-testing framework for search agent robustness to poor-quality evidence

DeepStress is a new evaluation framework that stress-tests search agents by replacing their retrieval module with a controlled synthetic environment, allowing systematic manipulation of document trustworthiness, relevance, and factuality. The authors test several search agents on HotpotQA and BrowseCompPlus, revealing substantial performance differences in handling unreliable information. The work introduces new metrics to capture system outcomes and conflicts between parametric and retrieved knowledge, addressing a gap in realistic benchmarks that rarely surface low-quality evidence scenarios.