Towards Recursive Self-Evolving Agentic Literature Retrieval

Abstract

Scientific literature retrieval must understand complex search intents while preserving source authenticity. Traditional keyword and embedding-based systems return authentic sources but miss nuanced intents, whereas large language models capture richer intents but may fabricate citations. We introduce PaSaMaster, a Recursive Self-Evolving agentic literature retrieval system that iteratively analyzes intent, retrieves verified papers and ranks them with evidence-grounded relevance scores. PaSaMaster combines self-evolving retrieval that refines search intent from ranked evidence over time, hallucination-free ranking over verified papers rather than generated citations, and cost-efficient planning--retrieval separation that reserves frontier LLMs for intent understanding while delegating retrieval and scoring to lightweight models and customized corpora. Across 38 disciplines in PaSaMaster-Bench, PaSaMaster achieves a 16.5$\times$ higher F1-score than Google Scholar and a 37.8\% higher F1-score than GPT-5.2 at about 1\% of the cost, while reducing source hallucination from 32.66\% in generative LLMs to zero: https://github.com/sjtu-sai-agents/PaSaMaster