Beyond Fluency: Toward Reliable Trajectories in Agentic IR

arXiv:2604.04269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Information Retrieval is shifting from passive document ranking toward autonomous agentic workflows that operate in multi-step Reason-Act-Observe loops. In such long-horizon trajectories, minor early errors can cascade, leading to functional misalignment between internal reasoning and external tool execution despite continued linguistic fluency. This position paper synthesizes failure modes observed in industrial agentic systems, categorizing error