How Budget-Aware Search Agents Break Performance Ceilings (BATS Framework)

Running on a Budget, Yet Smarter—How “Money-Wise” Search Agents Break the Performance Ceiling Keywords: budget-aware tool use, test-time scaling, search agent, BATS, Budget Tracker, cost-performance Pareto frontier Opening: Three Quick Questions Hand an agent 100 free search calls—will it actually use them? If it stops at 30 and calls it a day, will more budget move the accuracy needle? Can we teach the machine to check its wallet before every click? A new joint study by Google, UCSB and NYU says YES. “Simply letting the model see the remaining balance pushes accuracy up while keeping the tab unchanged—or even smaller.” …