Daily Papers

Researchers struggle to efficiently locate and manage relevant literature within the exponentially growing body of scientific publications. We present WisPaper, an intelligent academic retrieval and literature management platform that addresses this challenge through three integrated capabilities: (1) Scholar Search, featuring both quick keyword-based and deep agentic search modes for efficient paper discovery; (2) Library, a customizable knowledge base for systematic literature organization; and (3) AI Feeds, an intelligent recommendation system that automatically delivers relevant new publications based on user interests. Unlike existing academic tools, WisPaper provides a closed-loop workflow that seamlessly connects literature discovery, management, and continuous tracking of research frontiers. Our multilingual and multidisciplinary system significantly reduces the time researchers from diverse backgrounds spend on paper screening and management, enabling them to focus on their core research activities. The platform is publicly accessible and serves researchers across academia and industry.

Long-form video understanding presents significant challenges due to extensive temporal-spatial complexity and the difficulty of question answering under such extended contexts. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable advancements in video analysis capabilities and long context handling, they continue to exhibit limitations when processing information-dense hour-long videos. To overcome such limitations, we propose the Deep Video Discovery agent to leverage an agentic search strategy over segmented video clips. Different from previous video agents manually designing a rigid workflow, our approach emphasizes the autonomous nature of agents. By providing a set of search-centric tools on multi-granular video database, our DVD agent leverages the advanced reasoning capability of LLM to plan on its current observation state, strategically selects tools, formulates appropriate parameters for actions, and iteratively refines its internal reasoning in light of the gathered information. We perform comprehensive evaluation on multiple long video understanding benchmarks that demonstrates the advantage of the entire system design. Our DVD agent achieves SOTA performance, significantly surpassing prior works by a large margin on the challenging LVBench dataset. Comprehensive ablation studies and in-depth tool analyses are also provided, yielding insights to further advance intelligent agents tailored for long-form video understanding tasks. The code will be released later.

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances factual reasoning in LLMs by structurally modeling knowledge through graph-based representations. However, existing GraphRAG approaches face two core limitations: shallow retrieval that fails to surface all critical evidence, and inefficient utilization of pre-constructed structural graph data, which hinders effective reasoning from complex queries. To address these challenges, we propose GraphSearch, a novel agentic deep searching workflow with dual-channel retrieval for GraphRAG. GraphSearch organizes the retrieval process into a modular framework comprising six modules, enabling multi-turn interactions and iterative reasoning. Furthermore, GraphSearch adopts a dual-channel retrieval strategy that issues semantic queries over chunk-based text data and relational queries over structural graph data, enabling comprehensive utilization of both modalities and their complementary strengths. Experimental results across six multi-hop RAG benchmarks demonstrate that GraphSearch consistently improves answer accuracy and generation quality over the traditional strategy, confirming GraphSearch as a promising direction for advancing graph retrieval-augmented generation.

Recently, large reasoning models have demonstrated strong mathematical and coding abilities, and deep search leverages their reasoning capabilities in challenging information retrieval tasks. Existing deep search works are generally limited to a single knowledge source, either local or the Web. However, enterprises often require private deep search systems that can leverage search tools over both local and the Web corpus. Simply training an agent equipped with multiple search tools using flat reinforcement learning (RL) is a straightforward idea, but it has problems such as low training data efficiency and poor mastery of complex tools. To address the above issue, we propose a hierarchical agentic deep search framework, HierSearch, trained with hierarchical RL. At the low level, a local deep search agent and a Web deep search agent are trained to retrieve evidence from their corresponding domains. At the high level, a planner agent coordinates low-level agents and provides the final answer. Moreover, to prevent direct answer copying and error propagation, we design a knowledge refiner that filters out hallucinations and irrelevant evidence returned by low-level agents. Experiments show that HierSearch achieves better performance compared to flat RL, and outperforms various deep search and multi-source retrieval-augmented generation baselines in six benchmarks across general, finance, and medical domains.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable problem-solving abilities, but struggle with complex tasks due to static internal knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances access to external information, yet remains limited in multi-hop reasoning and strategic search due to rigid workflows. Recent advancements in agentic deep research empower LLMs to autonomously reason, search, and synthesize information. However, current approaches relying on outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) face critical issues such as conflicting gradients and reward sparsity, limiting performance gains and training efficiency. To address these, we first propose Atomic Thought, a novel LLM thinking paradigm that decomposes reasoning into fine-grained functional units. These units are supervised by Reasoning Reward Models (RRMs), which provide Atomic Thought Rewards (ATR) for fine-grained guidance. Building on this, we propose Atom-Searcher, a novel RL framework for agentic deep research that integrates Atomic Thought and ATR. Atom-Searcher uses a curriculum-inspired reward schedule, prioritizing process-level ATR early and transitioning to outcome rewards, accelerating convergence on effective reasoning paths. Experiments on seven benchmarks show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art. Key advantages include: (1) Atom-Searcher scales computation at test-time. (2) Atomic Thought provides supervision anchors for RRMs, bridging deep research tasks and RRMs. (3) Atom-Searcher exhibits more interpretable, human-like reasoning patterns.

Information retrieval is a cornerstone of modern knowledge acquisition, enabling billions of queries each day across diverse domains. However, traditional keyword-based search engines are increasingly inadequate for handling complex, multi-step information needs. Our position is that Large Language Models (LLMs), endowed with reasoning and agentic capabilities, are ushering in a new paradigm termed Agentic Deep Research. These systems transcend conventional information search techniques by tightly integrating autonomous reasoning, iterative retrieval, and information synthesis into a dynamic feedback loop. We trace the evolution from static web search to interactive, agent-based systems that plan, explore, and learn. We also introduce a test-time scaling law to formalize the impact of computational depth on reasoning and search. Supported by benchmark results and the rise of open-source implementations, we demonstrate that Agentic Deep Research not only significantly outperforms existing approaches, but is also poised to become the dominant paradigm for future information seeking. All the related resources, including industry products, research papers, benchmark datasets, and open-source implementations, are collected for the community in https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-Deep-Research.

Agentic search such as Deep Research systems, where large language models autonomously browse the web, synthesize information, and return comprehensive citation-backed answers, represents a major shift in how users interact with web-scale information. While promising greater efficiency and cognitive offloading, the growing complexity and open-endedness of agentic search have outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks and methodologies, which largely assume short search horizons and static answers. In this paper, we introduce Mind2Web 2, a benchmark of 130 realistic, high-quality, and long-horizon tasks that require real-time web browsing and extensive information synthesis, constructed with over 1,000 hours of human labor. To address the challenge of evaluating time-varying and complex answers, we propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge framework. Our method constructs task-specific judge agents based on a tree-structured rubric design to automatically assess both answer correctness and source attribution. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nine frontier agentic search systems and human performance, along with a detailed error analysis to draw insights for future development. The best-performing system, OpenAI Deep Research, can already achieve 50-70% of human performance while spending half the time, showing a great potential. Altogether, Mind2Web 2 provides a rigorous foundation for developing and benchmarking the next generation of agentic search systems.

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated exceptional logical capabilities in mathematical domains, their application to the legal field remains hindered by the strict requirements for procedural rigor and adherence to legal logic. Existing legal LLMs, which rely on "closed-loop reasoning" derived solely from internal parametric knowledge, frequently suffer from lack of self-awareness regarding their knowledge boundaries, leading to confident yet incorrect conclusions. To address this challenge, we present Legal Reasoning with Agentic Search (LRAS), the first framework designed to transition legal LLMs from static and parametric "closed-loop thinking" to dynamic and interactive "Active Inquiry". By integrating Introspective Imitation Learning and Difficulty-aware Reinforcement Learning, LRAS enables LRMs to identify knowledge boundaries and handle legal reasoning complexity. Empirical results demonstrate that LRAS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 8.2-32\%, with the most substantial gains observed in tasks requiring deep reasoning with reliable knowledge. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.

As AI tools become increasingly common for research ideation, robust evaluation is critical to ensure the validity and usefulness of generated ideas. We introduce ScholarEval, a retrieval augmented evaluation framework that assesses research ideas based on two fundamental criteria: soundness - the empirical validity of proposed methods based on existing literature, and contribution - the degree of advancement made by the idea across different dimensions relative to prior research. To evaluate ScholarEval, we introduce ScholarIdeas, the first expert-annotated dataset of multi-domain research ideas and reviews, comprised of 117 ideas across four disciplines: artificial intelligence, neuroscience, biochemistry, and ecology. Our evaluation shows that ScholarEval achieves significantly higher coverage of points mentioned in the human expert annotated rubrics in ScholarIdeas compared to all baselines. Furthermore, ScholarEval is consistently preferred over our strongest baseline o4-mini-deep-research, a reasoning and search-enabled agentic system by OpenAI, in terms of evaluation actionability, depth, and evidence support. Our large-scale user study also shows that ScholarEval significantly outperforms deep research in literature engagement, idea refinement, and usefulness. We openly release our code, dataset, and ScholarEval tool for the community to use and build on.

Deep search agents, which aim to answer complex questions requiring reasoning across multiple documents, can significantly speed up the information-seeking process. Collecting human annotations for this application is prohibitively expensive due to long and complex exploration trajectories. We propose an agentic pipeline that automatically generates high quality, difficulty-controlled deep search question-answer pairs for a given corpus and a target difficulty level. Our pipeline, SAGE, consists of a data generator which proposes QA pairs and a search agent which attempts to solve the generated question and provide execution feedback for the data generator. The two components interact over multiple rounds to iteratively refine the question-answer pairs until they satisfy the target difficulty level. Our intrinsic evaluation shows SAGE generates questions that require diverse reasoning strategies, while significantly increases the correctness and difficulty of the generated data. Our extrinsic evaluation demonstrates up to 23% relative performance gain on popular deep search benchmarks by training deep search agents with our synthetic data. Additional experiments show that agents trained on our data can adapt from fixed-corpus retrieval to Google Search at inference time, without further training.

In real-world video question answering scenarios, videos often provide only localized visual cues, while verifiable answers are distributed across the open web; models therefore need to jointly perform cross-frame clue extraction, iterative retrieval, and multi-hop reasoning-based verification. To bridge this gap, we construct the first video deep research benchmark, VideoDR. VideoDR centers on video-conditioned open-domain video question answering, requiring cross-frame visual anchor extraction, interactive web retrieval, and multi-hop reasoning over joint video-web evidence; through rigorous human annotation and quality control, we obtain high-quality video deep research samples spanning six semantic domains. We evaluate multiple closed-source and open-source multimodal large language models under both the Workflow and Agentic paradigms, and the results show that Agentic is not consistently superior to Workflow: its gains depend on a model's ability to maintain the initial video anchors over long retrieval chains. Further analysis indicates that goal drift and long-horizon consistency are the core bottlenecks. In sum, VideoDR provides a systematic benchmark for studying video agents in open-web settings and reveals the key challenges for next-generation video deep research agents.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and web agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-hop deep search tasks, yet current practice suffers from two major limitations. First, most benchmarks leak the reasoning path in the question text, allowing models to follow surface cues rather than discover reasoning chains autonomously. Second, evaluation is typically reduced to a single pass rate, which collapses diverse behaviours into one score and obscures whether failures stem from inadequate search, poor knowledge use, or inappropriate refusal. To address these issues, we present WebDetective, a benchmark of hint-free multi-hop questions paired with a controlled Wikipedia sandbox that ensures full traceability of model actions, and a holistic evaluation framework that separates search sufficiency, knowledge utilisation, and refusal behaviour. Our evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art models reveals systematic weaknesses across all architectures: models struggle with knowledge utilisation despite having sufficient evidence and demonstrate near-absent appropriate refusal when evidence is lacking. These patterns expose a fundamental gap: today's systems excel at executing given reasoning paths but fail when required to discover them. We develop an agentic workflow, EvidenceLoop, that explicitly targets the challenges our benchmark identifies, incorporating verification loops and systematic evidence tracking that improve both search and synthesis capabilities. This baseline demonstrates that WebDetective's diagnostic framework can guide concrete architectural improvements, establishing our benchmark as a critical tool for developing genuinely autonomous reasoning systems rather than pattern-following agents.

We present a new benchmark for evaluating Deep Search--a realistic and complex form of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that requires source-aware, multi-hop reasoning over diverse, sparsed, but related sources. These include documents, meeting transcripts, Slack messages, GitHub, and URLs, which vary in structure and often contain human-to-human interactions. We build it using a synthetic data pipeline that simulates business workflows across product planning, development, and support stages, generating interconnected content with realistic noise and multi-hop questions with guaranteed ground-truth answers. We release our benchmark with both answerable and unanswerable queries, and retrieval pool of 39,190 enterprise artifacts, enabling fine-grained evaluation of long-context LLM and RAG systems. Our experiments reveal that even the best-performing agentic RAG methods achieve an average performance score of 32.96 on our benchmark. With further analysis, we highlight retrieval as the main bottleneck: existing methods struggle to conduct deep searches and retrieve all necessary evidence. Consequently, they often reason over partial context, leading to significant performance degradation.

LLM-based deep research agents are largely built on the ReAct framework. This linear design makes it difficult to revisit earlier states, branch into alternative search directions, or maintain global awareness under long contexts, often leading to local optima, redundant exploration, and inefficient search. We propose Re-TRAC, an agentic framework that performs cross-trajectory exploration by generating a structured state representation after each trajectory to summarize evidence, uncertainties, failures, and future plans, and conditioning subsequent trajectories on this state representation. This enables iterative reflection and globally informed planning, reframing research as a progressive process. Empirical results show that Re-TRAC consistently outperforms ReAct by 15-20% on BrowseComp with frontier LLMs. For smaller models, we introduce Re-TRAC-aware supervised fine-tuning, achieving state-of-the-art performance at comparable scales. Notably, Re-TRAC shows a monotonic reduction in tool calls and token usage across rounds, indicating progressively targeted exploration driven by cross-trajectory reflection rather than redundant search.

Current Information Seeking (InfoSeeking) agents struggle to maintain focus and coherence during long-horizon exploration, as tracking search states, including planning procedure and massive search results, within one plain-text context is inherently fragile. To address this, we introduce Table-as-Search (TaS), a structured planning framework that reformulates the InfoSeeking task as a Table Completion task. TaS maps each query into a structured table schema maintained in an external database, where rows represent search candidates and columns denote constraints or required information. This table precisely manages the search states: filled cells strictly record the history and search results, while empty cells serve as an explicit search plan. Crucially, TaS unifies three distinct InfoSeeking tasks: Deep Search, Wide Search, and the challenging DeepWide Search. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TaS significantly outperforms numerous state-of-the-art baselines across three kinds of benchmarks, including multi-agent framework and commercial systems. Furthermore, our analysis validates the TaS's superior robustness in long-horizon InfoSeeking, alongside its efficiency, scalability and flexibility. Code and datasets are publicly released at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-Search-Agent.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) lifts the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs) by injecting external knowledge, yet it falls short on problems that demand multi-step inference; conversely, purely reasoning-oriented approaches often hallucinate or mis-ground facts. This survey synthesizes both strands under a unified reasoning-retrieval perspective. We first map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG (Reasoning-Enhanced RAG). Then, we show how retrieved knowledge of different type supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference (RAG-Enhanced Reasoning). Finally, we spotlight emerging Synergized RAG-Reasoning frameworks, where (agentic) LLMs iteratively interleave search and reasoning to achieve state-of-the-art performance across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. We categorize methods, datasets, and open challenges, and outline research avenues toward deeper RAG-Reasoning systems that are more effective, multimodally-adaptive, trustworthy, and human-centric. The collection is available at https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-RAG-Reasoning.

We introduce Agentic Reasoning, a framework that enhances large language model (LLM) reasoning by integrating external tool-using agents. Unlike conventional LLM-based reasoning approaches, which rely solely on internal inference, Agentic Reasoning dynamically engages web search, code execution, and structured reasoning-context memory to solve complex problems requiring deep research and multi-step logical deduction. Our framework introduces the Mind Map agent, which constructs a structured knowledge graph to track logical relationships, improving deductive reasoning. Additionally, the integration of web-search and coding agents enables real-time retrieval and computational analysis, enhancing reasoning accuracy and decision-making. Evaluations on PhD-level scientific reasoning (GPQA) and domain-specific deep research tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing models, including leading retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and closed-source LLMs. Moreover, our results indicate that agentic reasoning improves expert-level knowledge synthesis, test-time scalability, and structured problem-solving. The code is at: https://github.com/theworldofagents/Agentic-Reasoning.

Deep research systems are widely used for multi-step web research, analysis, and cross-source synthesis, yet their evaluation remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often require annotation-intensive task construction, rely on static evaluation dimensions, or fail to reliably verify facts when citations are missing. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DeepResearchEval, an automated framework for deep research task construction and agentic evaluation. For task construction, we propose a persona-driven pipeline generating realistic, complex research tasks anchored in diverse user profiles, applying a two-stage filter Task Qualification and Search Necessity to retain only tasks requiring multi-source evidence integration and external retrieval. For evaluation, we propose an agentic pipeline with two components: an Adaptive Point-wise Quality Evaluation that dynamically derives task-specific evaluation dimensions, criteria, and weights conditioned on each generated task, and an Active Fact-Checking that autonomously extracts and verifies report statements via web search, even when citations are missing.

Current search agents fundamentally lack the ability to simultaneously perform deep reasoning over multi-hop retrieval and wide-scale information collection-a critical deficiency for real-world applications like comprehensive market analysis and business development. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepWideSearch, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agents to integrate depth and width in information seeking. In DeepWideSearch, agents must process a large volume of data, each requiring deep reasoning over multi-hop retrieval paths. Specifically, we propose two methods to converse established datasets, resulting in a curated collection of 220 questions spanning 15 diverse domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art agents achieve only 2.39% average success rate on DeepWideSearch, highlighting the substantial challenge of integrating depth and width search in information-seeking tasks. Furthermore, our error analysis reveals four failure modes: lack of reflection, overreliance on internal knowledge, insufficient retrieval, and context overflow-exposing key limitations in current agent architectures. We publicly release DeepWideSearch to catalyze future research on more capable and robust information-seeking agents.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become the mainstream technique for training LLM agents. However, RLVR highly depends on well-crafted task queries and corresponding ground-truth answers to provide accurate rewards, which requires massive human efforts and hinders the RL scaling processes, especially under agentic scenarios. Although a few recent works explore task synthesis methods, the difficulty of generated agentic tasks can hardly be controlled to provide effective RL training advantages. To achieve agentic RLVR with higher scalability, we explore self-play training for deep search agents, in which the learning LLM utilizes multi-turn search engine calling and acts simultaneously as both a task proposer and a problem solver. The task proposer aims to generate deep search queries with well-defined ground-truth answers and increasing task difficulty. The problem solver tries to handle the generated search queries and output the correct answer predictions. To ensure that each generated search query has accurate ground truth, we collect all the searching results from the proposer's trajectory as external knowledge, then conduct retrieval-augmentation generation (RAG) to test whether the proposed query can be correctly answered with all necessary search documents provided. In this search self-play (SSP) game, the proposer and the solver co-evolve their agent capabilities through both competition and cooperation. With substantial experimental results, we find that SSP can significantly improve search agents' performance uniformly on various benchmarks without any supervision under both from-scratch and continuous RL training setups. The code is at https://github.com/Alibaba-Quark/SSP.

Deep research systems, agentic AI that solve complex, multi-step tasks by coordinating reasoning, search across the open web and user files, and tool use, are moving toward hierarchical deployments with a Planner, Coordinator, and Executors. In practice, training entire stacks end-to-end remains impractical, so most work trains a single planner connected to core tools such as search, browsing, and code. While SFT imparts protocol fidelity, it suffers from imitation and exposure biases and underuses environment feedback. Preference alignment methods such as DPO are schema and proxy-dependent, off-policy, and weak for long-horizon credit assignment and multi-objective trade-offs. A further limitation of SFT and DPO is their reliance on human defined decision points and subskills through schema design and labeled comparisons. Reinforcement learning aligns with closed-loop, tool-interaction research by optimizing trajectory-level policies, enabling exploration, recovery behaviors, and principled credit assignment, and it reduces dependence on such human priors and rater biases. This survey is, to our knowledge, the first dedicated to the RL foundations of deep research systems. It systematizes work after DeepSeek-R1 along three axes: (i) data synthesis and curation; (ii) RL methods for agentic research covering stability, sample efficiency, long context handling, reward and credit design, multi-objective optimization, and multimodal integration; and (iii) agentic RL training systems and frameworks. We also cover agent architecture and coordination, as well as evaluation and benchmarks, including recent QA, VQA, long-form synthesis, and domain-grounded, tool-interaction tasks. We distill recurring patterns, surface infrastructure bottlenecks, and offer practical guidance for training robust, transparent deep research agents with RL.

Information-seeking (IS) agents have achieved strong performance across a range of wide and deep search tasks, yet their tool use remains largely restricted to API-level snippet retrieval and URL-based page fetching, limiting access to the richer information available through real browsing. While full browser interaction could unlock deeper capabilities, its fine-grained control and verbose page content returns introduce substantial complexity for ReAct-style function-calling agents. To bridge this gap, we propose Nested Browser-Use Learning (NestBrowse), which introduces a minimal and complete browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. This design simplifies agentic reasoning while enabling effective deep-web information acquisition. Empirical results on challenging deep IS benchmarks demonstrate that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. Further in-depth analyses underscore its efficiency and flexibility.

Deep research -- producing comprehensive, citation-grounded reports by searching and synthesizing information from hundreds of live web sources -- marks an important frontier for agentic systems. To rigorously evaluate this ability, four principles are essential: tasks should be (1) user-centric, reflecting realistic information needs, (2) dynamic, requiring up-to-date information beyond parametric knowledge, (3) unambiguous, ensuring consistent interpretation across users, and (4) multi-faceted and search-intensive, requiring search over numerous web sources and in-depth analysis. Existing benchmarks fall short of these principles, often focusing on narrow domains or posing ambiguous questions that hinder fair comparison. Guided by these principles, we introduce LiveResearchBench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated tasks spanning daily life, enterprise, and academia, each requiring extensive, dynamic, real-time web search and synthesis. Built with over 1,500 hours of human labor, LiveResearchBench provides a rigorous basis for systematic evaluation. To evaluate citation-grounded long-form reports, we introduce DeepEval, a comprehensive suite covering both content- and report-level quality, including coverage, presentation, citation accuracy and association, consistency and depth of analysis. DeepEval integrates four complementary evaluation protocols, each designed to ensure stable assessment and high agreement with human judgments. Using LiveResearchBench and DeepEval, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 frontier deep research systems, including single-agent web search, single-agent deep research, and multi-agent systems. Our analysis reveals current strengths, recurring failure modes, and key system components needed to advance reliable, insightful deep research.

Large-scale reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated its effectiveness in harnessing the potential of large language models (LLMs) for single-turn reasoning tasks. In realistic reasoning scenarios, LLMs can often utilize external tools to assist in task-solving processes. However, current RL algorithms inadequately balance the models' intrinsic long-horizon reasoning capabilities and their proficiency in multi-turn tool interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization (ARPO), a novel agentic RL algorithm tailored for training multi-turn LLM-based agents. Through preliminary experiments, we observe that LLMs tend to exhibit highly uncertain behavior, characterized by an increase in the entropy distribution of generated tokens, immediately following interactions with external tools. Motivated by this observation, ARPO incorporates an entropy-based adaptive rollout mechanism, dynamically balancing global trajectory sampling and step-level sampling, thereby promoting exploration at steps with high uncertainty after tool usage. By integrating an advantage attribution estimation, ARPO enables LLMs to internalize advantage differences in stepwise tool-use interactions. Our experiments across 13 challenging benchmarks in computational reasoning, knowledge reasoning, and deep search domains demonstrate ARPO's superiority over trajectory-level RL algorithms. Remarkably, ARPO achieves improved performance using only half of the tool-use budget required by existing methods, offering a scalable solution for aligning LLM-based agents with real-time dynamic environments. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/dongguanting/ARPO

Despite recent progress in multimodal agentic systems, existing approaches often treat image manipulation and web search as disjoint capabilities, rely heavily on costly reinforcement learning, and lack planning grounded in real tool-execution traces. To address these limitations, we present Skywork-R1V4, a 30B (A3B) parameter multimodal agentic model that unifies multimodal planning, active image manipulation ("thinking with images"), deep multimodal search, and, most critically, interleaved reasoning that dynamically alternates between visual operations and external knowledge retrieval. Trained solely via supervised fine-tuning on fewer than 30,000 high-quality, planning-execution-consistent trajectories and validated through stepwise consistency filtering, Skywork-R1V4 achieves state-of-the-art results across perception and multimodal search benchmarks: it scores 66.1 on MMSearch and 67.2 on FVQA, surpassing Gemini 2.5 Flash on all 11 metrics. Skywork-R1V4 exhibits emergent long-horizon reasoning at inference time, successfully orchestrating more than 10 tool calls to solve complex, multi-step tasks. Our results demonstrate that sophisticated agentic multimodal intelligence can be achieved through carefully curated supervised learning alone, without any reliance on reinforcement learning.

LLM-powered search agents are increasingly being used for multi-step information seeking tasks, yet the IR community lacks empirical understanding of how agentic search sessions unfold and how retrieved evidence is used. This paper presents a large-scale log analysis of agentic search based on 14.44M search requests (3.97M sessions) collected from DeepResearchGym, i.e. an open-source search API accessed by external agentic clients. We sessionize the logs, assign session-level intents and step-wise query-reformulation labels using LLM-based annotation, and propose Context-driven Term Adoption Rate (CTAR) to quantify whether newly introduced query terms are traceable to previously retrieved evidence. Our analyses reveal distinctive behavioral patterns. First, over 90% of multi-turn sessions contain at most ten steps, and 89% of inter-step intervals fall under one minute. Second, behavior varies by intent. Fact-seeking sessions exhibit high repetition that increases over time, while sessions requiring reasoning sustain broader exploration. Third, agents reuse evidence across steps. On average, 54% of newly introduced query terms appear in the accumulated evidence context, with contributions from earlier steps beyond the most recent retrieval. The findings suggest that agentic search may benefit from repetition-aware early stopping, intent-adaptive retrieval budgets, and explicit cross-step context tracking. We plan to release the anonymized logs to support future research.

Agentic search, as a more autonomous and adaptive paradigm of retrieval augmentation, is driving the evolution of intelligent search systems. However, existing evaluation frameworks fail to align well with the goals of agentic search. First, the complex queries commonly used in current benchmarks often deviate from realistic user search scenarios. Second, prior approaches tend to introduce noise when extracting ground truth for end-to-end evaluations, leading to distorted assessments at a fine-grained level. Third, most current frameworks focus solely on the quality of final answers, neglecting the evaluation of the iterative process inherent to agentic search. To address these limitations, we propose RAVine -- a Reality-Aligned eValuation framework for agentic LLMs with search. RAVine targets multi-point queries and long-form answers that better reflect user intents, and introduces an attributable ground truth construction strategy to enhance the accuracy of fine-grained evaluation. Moreover, RAVine examines model's interaction with search tools throughout the iterative process, and accounts for factors of efficiency. We benchmark a series of models using RAVine and derive several insights, which we hope will contribute to advancing the development of agentic search systems. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/SwordFaith/RAVine.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains. However, designing high-performing agentic systems remains challenging. Existing agent search methods suffer from three major limitations: (1) an emphasis on optimizing agentic workflows while under-utilizing proven human-designed components such as memory, planning, and tool use; (2) high evaluation costs, as each newly generated agent must be fully evaluated on benchmarks; and (3) inefficient search in large search space. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges. First, We propose a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components, enabling richer agentic system designs. Building on this structured design space, we introduce a predictive value model that estimates agent performance given agentic system and task description, allowing for efficient, low-cost evaluation during the search process. Finally, we present a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy informed by uncertainty to guide the search. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering embodied, math, web, tool, and game, show that our method achieves an average performance gain of 8.34\% over state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits faster search progress with steeper improvement trajectories. Code repo is available at https://github.com/Ericccc02/AgentSwift.

Agentic search has emerged as a promising paradigm for complex information seeking by enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to interleave reasoning with tool use. However, prevailing systems rely on monolithic agents that suffer from structural bottlenecks, including unconstrained reasoning outputs that inflate trajectories, sparse outcome-level rewards that complicate credit assignment, and stochastic search noise that destabilizes learning. To address these challenges, we propose M-ASK (Multi-Agent Search and Knowledge), a framework that explicitly decouples agentic search into two complementary roles: Search Behavior Agents, which plan and execute search actions, and Knowledge Management Agents, which aggregate, filter, and maintain a compact internal context. This decomposition allows each agent to focus on a well-defined subtask and reduces interference between search and context construction. Furthermore, to enable stable coordination, M-ASK employs turn-level rewards to provide granular supervision for both search decisions and knowledge updates. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that M-ASK outperforms strong baselines, achieving not only superior answer accuracy but also significantly more stable training dynamics.The source code for M-ASK is available at https://github.com/chenyiqun/M-ASK.

Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains largely underexplored. Existing search agents typically rely on similarity-based retrievers, while similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. In this paper, we propose a novel retriever training framework tailored for agentic search. Unlike retrievers designed for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that only rely on local passage utility, we propose to use both local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility in a multi-turn agentic search. We further introduce an iterative training strategy, where the search agent and the retriever are optimized bidirectionally and iteratively. Different from RAG retrievers that are only trained once with fixed questions, our retriever is continuously improved using evolving and higher-quality queries from the agent. Extensive experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that our retriever, termed , consistently outperforms strong baselines across different search agents. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/8421BCD/Agentic-R.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly revolutionized web search. The emergence of LLM-based Search Agents marks a pivotal shift towards deeper, dynamic, autonomous information seeking. These agents can comprehend user intentions and environmental context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. Leading examples like OpenAI's Deep Research highlight their potential for deep information mining and real-world applications. This survey provides the first systematic analysis of search agents. We comprehensively analyze and categorize existing works from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation, ultimately identifying critical open challenges and outlining promising future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. Our repository is available on https://github.com/YunjiaXi/Awesome-Search-Agent-Papers.

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.

Existing multimodal retrieval systems excel at semantic matching but implicitly assume that query-image relevance can be measured in isolation. This paradigm overlooks the rich dependencies inherent in realistic visual streams, where information is distributed across temporal sequences rather than confined to single snapshots. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepImageSearch, a novel agentic paradigm that reformulates image retrieval as an autonomous exploration task. Models must plan and perform multi-step reasoning over raw visual histories to locate targets based on implicit contextual cues. We construct DISBench, a challenging benchmark built on interconnected visual data. To address the scalability challenge of creating context-dependent queries, we propose a human-model collaborative pipeline that employs vision-language models to mine latent spatiotemporal associations, effectively offloading intensive context discovery before human verification. Furthermore, we build a robust baseline using a modular agent framework equipped with fine-grained tools and a dual-memory system for long-horizon navigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DISBench poses significant challenges to state-of-the-art models, highlighting the necessity of incorporating agentic reasoning into next-generation retrieval systems.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has transformed information access and reasoning through open-ended natural language interaction. However, LLMs remain limited by static knowledge, factual hallucinations, and the inability to retrieve real-time or domain-specific information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by grounding model outputs in external evidence, but traditional RAG pipelines are often single turn and heuristic, lacking adaptive control over retrieval and reasoning. Recent advances in agentic search address these limitations by enabling LLMs to plan, retrieve, and reflect through multi-step interaction with search environments. Within this paradigm, reinforcement learning (RL) offers a powerful mechanism for adaptive and self-improving search behavior. This survey provides the first comprehensive overview of RL-based agentic search, organizing the emerging field along three complementary dimensions: (i) What RL is for (functional roles), (ii) How RL is used (optimization strategies), and (iii) Where RL is applied (scope of optimization). We summarize representative methods, evaluation protocols, and applications, and discuss open challenges and future directions toward building reliable and scalable RL driven agentic search systems. We hope this survey will inspire future research on the integration of RL and agentic search. Our repository is available at https://github.com/ventr1c/Awesome-RL-based-Agentic-Search-Papers.

Tool-integrated reasoning has emerged as a key focus for enabling agentic applications. Among these, DeepResearch Agents have gained significant attention for their strong performance on complex, open-ended information-seeking tasks. We introduce Fathom-DeepResearch, an agentic system composed of two specialized models. The first is Fathom-Search-4B, a DeepSearch model trained from Qwen3-4B and optimized for evidence-based investigation through live web search and targeted webpage querying. Its training combines three advances: (i) DUETQA, a 5K-sample dataset generated via multi-agent self-play that enforces strict web-search dependence and heterogeneous source grounding; (ii) RAPO, a zero-overhead extension of GRPO that stabilizes multi-turn Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards through curriculum pruning, reward-aware advantage scaling, and per-prompt replay buffers; and (iii) a steerable step-level reward that classifies each tool call by cognitive behavior and marginal utility, enabling explicit control over search trajectory breadth, depth, and horizon. These improvements enable reliable extension of tool-calling beyond 20 calls when warranted. The second is Fathom-Synthesizer-4B, trained from Qwen3-4B, which converts multi-turn DeepSearch traces into structured, citation-dense DeepResearch Reports for comprehensive synthesis. Evaluated on DeepSearch benchmarks (SimpleQA, FRAMES, WebWalker, Seal0, MuSiQue) and DeepResearch-Bench, the system achieves state-of-the-art performance in the open-weights category while demonstrating strong generalization to diverse reasoning tasks including HLE, AIME-25, GPQA-Diamond, and MedQA.

Recent advances in web-augmented large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong performance in complex reasoning tasks, yet these capabilities are mostly locked in proprietary systems with opaque architectures. In this work, we propose ManuSearch, a transparent and modular multi-agent framework designed to democratize deep search for LLMs. ManuSearch decomposes the search and reasoning process into three collaborative agents: (1) a solution planning agent that iteratively formulates sub-queries, (2) an Internet search agent that retrieves relevant documents via real-time web search, and (3) a structured webpage reading agent that extracts key evidence from raw web content. To rigorously evaluate deep reasoning abilities, we introduce ORION, a challenging benchmark focused on open-web reasoning over long-tail entities, covering both English and Chinese. Experimental results show that ManuSearch substantially outperforms prior open-source baselines and even surpasses leading closed-source systems. Our work paves the way for reproducible, extensible research in open deep search systems. We release the data and code in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ManuSearch

Agentic search leverages LLMs to solve complex user information needs by executing a multi-step process of planning, searching, and synthesizing information to provide answers. This paradigm introduces unique challenges for LLMs' agentic reasoning capabilities when interacting with search systems. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based pipeline to study effective reasoning behavior patterns in agentic search by analyzing agentic search trajectories. Using this pipeline, we identify four beneficial reasoning behaviors: Information Verification, Authority Evaluation, Adaptive Search, and Error Recovery. Based on these findings, we propose a technique called Behavior Priming to train agentic search models. It synthesizes trajectories that exhibit these four behaviors and integrates them into the agentic search model through SFT, followed by standard reinforcement learning. Experiments on Qwen3-1.7B and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct across three web benchmarks and seven multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that behavior priming 1) yields significant performance gains compared to training with direct RL, and 2) outperforms other SFT-then-RL baselines, such as those SFT on randomly selected trajectories or on trajectories with merely correct outcomes. Crucially, we demonstrate that the reasoning behaviors, rather than the correctness of the final answer, is the critical factor for achieving strong performance in RL: SFT on trajectories with reasoning behaviors but incorrect answers leads to comparable performance with SFT on those with reasoning behaviors and correct answers. Our analysis further reveals that the introduced reasoning behaviors endow models with more effective exploration (higher pass@k and entropy) and test-time scaling (longer trajectories) capabilities, providing a strong foundation for RL. Our code are avalible at https://github.com/cxcscmu/Behavior_Priming_For_Agentic_Search.

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

Recent advances in deep-research systems have demonstrated the potential for AI agents to autonomously discover and synthesize knowledge from external sources. In this paper, we introduce WebResearcher, a novel framework for building such agents through two key components: (1) WebResearcher, an iterative deep-research paradigm that reformulates deep research as a Markov Decision Process, where agents periodically consolidate findings into evolving reports while maintaining focused workspaces, overcoming the context suffocation and noise contamination that plague existing mono-contextual approaches; and (2) WebFrontier, a scalable data synthesis engine that generates high-quality training data through tool-augmented complexity escalation, enabling systematic creation of research tasks that bridge the gap between passive knowledge recall and active knowledge construction. Notably, we find that the training data from our paradigm significantly enhances tool-use capabilities even for traditional mono-contextual methods. Furthermore, our paradigm naturally scales through parallel thinking, enabling concurrent multi-agent exploration for more comprehensive conclusions. Extensive experiments across 6 challenging benchmarks demonstrate that WebResearcher achieves state-of-the-art performance, even surpassing frontier proprietary systems.

What will information entry look like in the next generation of digital products? Since the 1970s, user access to relevant information has relied on domain-specific architectures of information retrieval (IR). Over the past two decades, the advent of modern IR systems, including web search engines and personalized recommender systems, has greatly improved the efficiency of retrieving relevant information from vast data corpora. However, the core paradigm of these IR systems remains largely unchanged, relying on filtering a predefined set of candidate items. Since 2022, breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have begun transforming how information is accessed, establishing a new technical paradigm. In this position paper, we introduce Agentic Information Retrieval (Agentic IR), a novel IR paradigm shaped by the capabilities of LLM agents. Agentic IR expands the scope of accessible tasks and leverages a suite of new techniques to redefine information retrieval. We discuss three types of cutting-edge applications of agentic IR and the challenges faced. We propose that agentic IR holds promise for generating innovative applications, potentially becoming a central information entry point in future digital ecosystems.

We present Tongyi DeepResearch, an agentic large language model, which is specifically designed for long-horizon, deep information-seeking research tasks. To incentivize autonomous deep research agency, Tongyi DeepResearch is developed through an end-to-end training framework that combines agentic mid-training and agentic post-training, enabling scalable reasoning and information seeking across complex tasks. We design a highly scalable data synthesis pipeline that is fully automatic, without relying on costly human annotation, and empowers all training stages. By constructing customized environments for each stage, our system enables stable and consistent interactions throughout. Tongyi DeepResearch, featuring 30.5 billion total parameters, with only 3.3 billion activated per token, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of agentic deep research benchmarks, including Humanity's Last Exam, BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, WebWalkerQA, xbench-DeepSearch, FRAMES and xbench-DeepSearch-2510. We open-source the model, framework, and complete solutions to empower the community.

Addressing intricate real-world problems necessitates in-depth information seeking and multi-step reasoning. Recent progress in agentic systems, exemplified by Deep Research, underscores the potential for autonomous multi-step research. In this work, we present a cohesive paradigm for building end-to-end agentic information seeking agents from a data-centric and training-stage perspective. Our approach consists of four key stages: (1) browsing data construction, (2) trajectories sampling, (3) supervised fine-tuning for effective cold start, and (4) reinforcement learning for enhanced generalisation. We instantiate this framework in a web agent based on the ReAct, WebDancer. Empirical evaluations on the challenging information seeking benchmarks, GAIA and WebWalkerQA, demonstrate the strong performance of WebDancer, achieving considerable results and highlighting the efficacy of our training paradigm. Further analysis of agent training provides valuable insights and actionable, systematic pathways for developing more capable agentic models. The codes and demo will be released in https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/WebAgent.

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved from text generators into powerful problem solvers. Yet, many open tasks demand critical thinking, multi-source, and verifiable outputs, which are beyond single-shot prompting or standard retrieval-augmented generation. Recently, numerous studies have explored Deep Research (DR), which aims to combine the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with external tools, such as search engines, thereby empowering LLMs to act as research agents capable of completing complex, open-ended tasks. This survey presents a comprehensive and systematic overview of deep research systems, including a clear roadmap, foundational components, practical implementation techniques, important challenges, and future directions. Specifically, our main contributions are as follows: (i) we formalize a three-stage roadmap and distinguish deep research from related paradigms; (ii) we introduce four key components: query planning, information acquisition, memory management, and answer generation, each paired with fine-grained sub-taxonomies; (iii) we summarize optimization techniques, including prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and agentic reinforcement learning; and (iv) we consolidate evaluation criteria and open challenges, aiming to guide and facilitate future development. As the field of deep research continues to evolve rapidly, we are committed to continuously updating this survey to reflect the latest progress in this area.

Deep research is an inherently challenging task that demands both breadth and depth of thinking. It involves navigating diverse knowledge spaces and reasoning over complex, multi-step dependencies, which presents substantial challenges for agentic systems. To address this, we propose FlowSearch, a multi-agent framework that actively constructs and evolves a dynamic structured knowledge flow to drive subtask execution and reasoning. FlowSearch is capable of strategically planning and expanding the knowledge flow to enable parallel exploration and hierarchical task decomposition, while also adjusting the knowledge flow in real time based on feedback from intermediate reasoning outcomes and insights. FlowSearch achieves state-of-the-art performance on both general and scientific benchmarks, including GAIA, HLE, GPQA and TRQA, demonstrating its effectiveness in multi-disciplinary research scenarios and its potential to advance scientific discovery. The code is available at https://github.com/Alpha-Innovator/InternAgent.

We introduce DeepSearchQA, a 900-prompt benchmark for evaluating agents on difficult multi-step information-seeking tasks across 17 different fields. Unlike traditional benchmarks that target single answer retrieval or broad-spectrum factuality, DeepSearchQA features a dataset of challenging, handcrafted tasks designed to evaluate an agent's ability to execute complex search plans to generate exhaustive answer lists. This shift in design explicitly tests three critical, yet under-evaluated capabilities: 1) systematic collation of fragmented information from disparate sources, 2) de-duplication and entity resolution to ensure precision, and 3) the ability to reason about stopping criteria within an open-ended search space. Each task is structured as a causal chain, where discovering information for one step is dependent on the successful completion of the previous one, stressing long-horizon planning and context retention. All tasks are grounded in the open web with objectively verifiable answer sets. Our comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art agent architectures reveals significant performance limitations: even the most advanced models struggle to balance high recall with precision. We observe distinct failure modes ranging from premature stopping (under-retrieval) to hedging behaviors, where agents cast an overly wide net of low-confidence answers to artificially boost recall. These findings highlight critical headroom in current agent designs and position DeepSearchQA as an essential diagnostic tool for driving future research toward more robust, deep-research capabilities.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as a transformative approach for open-ended problem solving, with information seeking (IS) being a core capability that enables autonomous reasoning and decision-making. While prior research has largely focused on improving retrieval depth, we observe that current IS agents often suffer from low search efficiency, which in turn constrains overall performance. A key factor underlying this inefficiency is the sparsity of target entities in training tasks, which limits opportunities for agents to learn and generalize efficient search behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose WebLeaper, a framework for constructing high-coverage IS tasks and generating efficient solution trajectories. We formulate IS as a tree-structured reasoning problem, enabling a substantially larger set of target entities to be embedded within a constrained context. Leveraging curated Wikipedia tables, we propose three variants for synthesizing IS tasks, Basic, Union, and Reverse-Union, to systematically increase both IS efficiency and efficacy. Finally, we curate training trajectories by retaining only those that are simultaneously accurate and efficient, ensuring that the model is optimized for both correctness and search performance. Extensive experiments on both basic and comprehensive settings, conducted on five IS benchmarks, BrowserComp, GAIA, xbench-DeepSearch, WideSearch, and Seal-0, demonstrate that our method consistently achieves improvements in both effectiveness and efficiency over strong baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool use and multi-step reasoning for complex problem-solving. However, post-training approaches building upon general-purpose foundation models consistently underperform in agentic tasks, particularly in open-source implementations. We identify the root cause: the absence of robust agentic foundation models forces models during post-training to simultaneously learn diverse agentic behaviors while aligning them to expert demonstrations, thereby creating fundamental optimization tensions. To this end, we are the first to propose incorporating Agentic Continual Pre-training (Agentic CPT) into the deep research agents training pipeline to build powerful agentic foundational models. Based on this approach, we develop a deep research agent model named AgentFounder. We evaluate our AgentFounder-30B on 10 benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance while retains strong tool-use ability, notably 39.9% on BrowseComp-en, 43.3% on BrowseComp-zh, and 31.5% Pass@1 on HLE.

Deep research systems represent an emerging class of agentic information retrieval methods that generate comprehensive and well-supported reports to complex queries. However, most existing frameworks rely on dynamic commercial search APIs, which pose reproducibility and transparency challenges in addition to their cost. To address these limitations, we introduce DeepResearchGym, an open-source sandbox that combines a reproducible search API with a rigorous evaluation protocol for benchmarking deep research systems. The API indexes large-scale public web corpora, namely ClueWeb22 and FineWeb, using a state-of-the-art dense retriever and approximate nearest neighbor search via DiskANN. It achieves lower latency than popular commercial APIs while ensuring stable document rankings across runs, and is freely available for research use. To evaluate deep research systems' outputs, we extend the Researchy Questions benchmark with automatic metrics through LLM-as-a-judge assessments to measure alignment with users' information needs, retrieval faithfulness, and report quality. Experimental results show that systems integrated with DeepResearchGym achieve performance comparable to those using commercial APIs, with performance rankings remaining consistent across evaluation metrics. A human evaluation study further confirms that our automatic protocol aligns with human preferences, validating the framework's ability to help support controlled assessment of deep research systems. Our code and API documentation are available at https://www.deepresearchgym.ai.

This paper presents first successful steps in designing search agents that learn meta-strategies for iterative query refinement in information-seeking tasks. Our approach uses machine reading to guide the selection of refinement terms from aggregated search results. Agents are then empowered with simple but effective search operators to exert fine-grained and transparent control over queries and search results. We develop a novel way of generating synthetic search sessions, which leverages the power of transformer-based language models through (self-)supervised learning. We also present a reinforcement learning agent with dynamically constrained actions that learns interactive search strategies from scratch. Our search agents obtain retrieval and answer quality performance comparable to recent neural methods, using only a traditional term-based BM25 ranking function and interpretable discrete reranking and filtering actions.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have enabled agentic search systems that interleave multi-step reasoning with external tool use. However, existing frameworks largely rely on unstructured natural-language reasoning and accumulate raw intermediate traces in the context, which often leads to unstable reasoning trajectories, context overflow, and degraded performance on complex multi-hop queries. In this study, we introduce Laser, a general framework for stabilizing and scaling agentic search. Laser defines a symbolic action protocol that organizes agent behaviors into three spaces: planning, task-solving, and retrospection. Each action is specified with explicit semantics and a deterministic execution format, enabling structured and logical reasoning processes and reliable action parsing. This design makes intermediate decisions interpretable and traceable, enhancing explicit retrospection and fine-grained control over reasoning trajectories. In coordination with parsable actions, Laser further maintains a compact context register that stores only essential states of the reasoning process, allowing the agent to reason over long horizons without uncontrolled context expansion. Experiments on Qwen2.5/3-series models across challenging multi-hop QA datasets show that Laser consistently outperforms existing agentic search baselines under both prompting-only and fine-tuning settings, demonstrating that Laser provides a principled and effective foundation for robust, scalable agentic search.

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) represent a classic paradigm where models enhance generative capabilities using external knowledge retrieved via a specialized module. Recent advancements in Agent techniques enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously utilize tools for retrieval, planning, and reasoning. While existing training-based methods show promise, their agentic abilities are limited by inherent characteristics of the task-specific data used during training. To further enhance the universal search capability of agents, we propose a novel pre-training framework, MaskSearch. In the pre-training stage, we introduce the Retrieval Augmented Mask Prediction (RAMP) task, where the model learns to leverage search tools to fill masked spans on a large number of pre-training data, thus acquiring universal retrieval and reasoning capabilities for LLMs. After that, the model is trained on downstream tasks to achieve further improvement. We apply both Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for training. For SFT, we combine agent-based and distillation-based methods to generate training data, starting with a multi-agent system consisting of a planner, rewriter, observer, and followed by a self-evolving teacher model. While for RL, we employ DAPO as the training framework and adopt a hybrid reward system consisting of answer rewards and format rewards. Additionally, we introduce a curriculum learning approach that allows the model to learn progressively from easier to more challenging instances based on the number of masked spans. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework in the scenario of open-domain multi-hop question answering. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MaskSearch significantly enhances the performance of LLM-based search agents on both in-domain and out-of-domain downstream tasks.

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with complex, interleaved reasoning and tool-use capabilities has become a key focus in agentic AI research, especially with recent advances in reasoning-oriented (``thinking'') models. Such capabilities are key to unlocking a number of important applications. One such application is Deep Research (DR), which requires extensive search and reasoning over many sources. Our work in this paper focuses on the development of native Autonomous Single-Agent models for DR featuring minimal web crawling and Python tool integration. Unlike multi-agent systems, where agents take up pre-defined roles and are told what to do at each step in a static workflow, an autonomous single-agent determines its next action dynamically based on context, without manual directive. While prior work has proposed training recipes for base or instruction-tuned LLMs, we focus on continual reinforcement learning (RL) of reasoning-optimized models to further enhance agentic skills while preserving reasoning ability. Towards this end, we propose a simple RL recipe with entirely synthetic data, which we apply to various open-source LLMs. Our best variant SFR-DR-20B achieves up to 28.7% on Humanity's Last Exam benchmark. In addition, we conduct key analysis experiments to provide more insights into our methodologies.

DeepResearch agents represent a transformative AI paradigm, conducting expert-level research through sophisticated reasoning and multi-tool integration. However, evaluating these systems remains critically challenging due to open-ended research scenarios and existing benchmarks that focus on isolated capabilities rather than holistic performance. Unlike traditional LLM tasks, DeepResearch systems must synthesize diverse sources, generate insights, and present coherent findings, which are capabilities that resist simple verification. To address this gap, we introduce DeepResearch-ReportEval, a comprehensive framework designed to assess DeepResearch systems through their most representative outputs: research reports. Our approach systematically measures three dimensions: quality, redundancy, and factuality, using an innovative LLM-as-a-Judge methodology achieving strong expert concordance. We contribute a standardized benchmark of 100 curated queries spanning 12 real-world categories, enabling systematic capability comparison. Our evaluation of four leading commercial systems reveals distinct design philosophies and performance trade-offs, establishing foundational insights as DeepResearch evolves from information assistants toward intelligent research partners. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/DeepResearch-Eval.

Transcending human cognitive limitations represents a critical frontier in LLM training. Proprietary agentic systems like DeepResearch have demonstrated superhuman capabilities on extremely complex information-seeking benchmarks such as BrowseComp, a feat previously unattainable. We posit that their success hinges on a sophisticated reasoning pattern absent in open-source models: the ability to systematically reduce extreme uncertainty when navigating vast information landscapes. Based on this insight, we introduce WebSailor, a complete post-training methodology designed to instill this crucial capability. Our approach involves generating novel, high-uncertainty tasks through structured sampling and information obfuscation, RFT cold start, and an efficient agentic RL training algorithm, Duplicating Sampling Policy Optimization (DUPO). With this integrated pipeline, WebSailor significantly outperforms all open-source agents in complex information-seeking tasks, matching proprietary agents' performance and closing the capability gap.

Transcending human cognitive limitations represents a critical frontier in LLM training. Proprietary agentic systems like DeepResearch have demonstrated superhuman capabilities on extremely complex information-seeking benchmarks such as BrowseComp, a feat previously unattainable. We posit that their success hinges on a sophisticated reasoning pattern absent in open-source models: the ability to systematically reduce extreme uncertainty when navigating vast information landscapes. Based on this insight, we introduce WebSailor, a complete post-training methodology designed to instill this crucial capability. Our approach involves generating novel, high-uncertainty tasks through structured sampling and information obfuscation, RFT cold start, and an efficient agentic RL training algorithm, Duplicating Sampling Policy Optimization (DUPO). With this integrated pipeline, WebSailor significantly outperforms all opensource agents in complex information-seeking tasks, matching proprietary agents' performance and closing the capability gap.

Building Large Language Model agents that expand their capabilities by interacting with external tools represents a new frontier in AI research and applications. In this paper, we introduce InfoAgent, a deep research agent powered by an innovative data synthesis pipeline and orchestrated web search tools. To construct challenging, hard-to-find queries,we build entity trees and apply sub-tree sampling with entity fuzzification to systematically increase question difficulty. Unlike prior work that relies heavily on commercial search tools, we develop a dedicated self-hosted search infrastructure, enhancing transparency of agent environments and facilitating further advancement of agent capacity. We evaluate the effectiveness of our data pipeline by measuring the average number of tool calls required to correctly answer a question, and also show that our agent yields better performance when equipped with our tools. Our InfoAgent is post-trained from Qwen3-14B using a two-stage recipe: cold-start supervised finetuning to instill long-horizon search behaviors, followed by reinforcement learning which significantly improves reasoning-driven tool use. With our methods, InfoAgent achieves 15.3\% accuracy on BrowseComp, 29.2\% on BrowseComp-ZH, and 40.4\% on Xbench-DS, outperforming prior open-source deep research agents such as WebSailor-72B and DeepDive-32B.

In this paper, we introduce the AI Search Paradigm, a comprehensive blueprint for next-generation search systems capable of emulating human information processing and decision-making. The paradigm employs a modular architecture of four LLM-powered agents (Master, Planner, Executor and Writer) that dynamically adapt to the full spectrum of information needs, from simple factual queries to complex multi-stage reasoning tasks. These agents collaborate dynamically through coordinated workflows to evaluate query complexity, decompose problems into executable plans, and orchestrate tool usage, task execution, and content synthesis. We systematically present key methodologies for realizing this paradigm, including task planning and tool integration, execution strategies, aligned and robust retrieval-augmented generation, and efficient LLM inference, spanning both algorithmic techniques and infrastructure-level optimizations. By providing an in-depth guide to these foundational components, this work aims to inform the development of trustworthy, adaptive, and scalable AI search systems.

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with browsing tools substantially improves their potential as deep search agents to solve complex, real-world tasks. Yet, open LLMs still perform poorly in such settings due to limited long-horizon reasoning capacity with browsing tools and the lack of sufficiently difficult supervised data. To address these challenges, we present DeepDive to advance deep search agents. First, we propose a strategy to automatically synthesize complex, difficult, and hard-to-find questions from open knowledge graphs. Second, we apply end-to-end multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance LLMs' long-horizon reasoning with deep search. Experiments show that DeepDive-32B achieves a new open-source competitive result on BrowseComp, outperforming WebSailor, DeepSeek-R1-Browse, and Search-o1. We demonstrate that multi-turn RL training improves deep search ability and significantly contributes to the performance improvements across multiple benchmarks. We observe that DeepDive enables test-time scaling of tool calls and parallel sampling. All datasets, models, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/THUDM/DeepDive.

Complex information needs in real-world search scenarios demand deep reasoning and knowledge synthesis across diverse sources, which traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines struggle to address effectively. Current reasoning-based approaches suffer from a fundamental limitation: they use a single model to handle both high-level planning and detailed execution, leading to inefficient reasoning and limited scalability. In this paper, we introduce HiRA, a hierarchical framework that separates strategic planning from specialized execution. Our approach decomposes complex search tasks into focused subtasks, assigns each subtask to domain-specific agents equipped with external tools and reasoning capabilities, and coordinates the results through a structured integration mechanism. This separation prevents execution details from disrupting high-level reasoning while enabling the system to leverage specialized expertise for different types of information processing. Experiments on four complex, cross-modal deep search benchmarks demonstrate that HiRA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RAG and agent-based systems. Our results show improvements in both answer quality and system efficiency, highlighting the effectiveness of decoupled planning and execution for multi-step information seeking tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/HiRA.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown great potential for knowledge-intensive tasks, but its traditional architectures rely on static retrieval, limiting their effectiveness for complex questions that require sequential information-seeking. While agentic reasoning and search offer a more adaptive approach, most existing methods depend heavily on prompt engineering. In this work, we introduce RAG-Gym, a unified optimization framework that enhances information-seeking agents through fine-grained process supervision at each search step. We also propose ReSearch, a novel agent architecture that synergizes answer reasoning and search query generation within the RAG-Gym framework. Experiments on four challenging datasets show that RAG-Gym improves performance by up to 25.6\% across various agent architectures, with ReSearch consistently outperforming existing baselines. Further analysis highlights the effectiveness of advanced LLMs as process reward judges and the transferability of trained reward models as verifiers for different LLMs. Additionally, we examine the scaling properties of training and inference in agentic RAG. The project homepage is available at https://rag-gym.github.io/.

Search agents have achieved significant advancements in enabling intelligent information retrieval and decision-making within interactive environments. Although reinforcement learning has been employed to train agentic models capable of more dynamic interactive retrieval, existing methods are limited by shallow tool-use depth and the accumulation of errors over multiple iterative interactions. In this paper, we present WebSeer, a more intelligent search agent trained via reinforcement learning enhanced with a self-reflection mechanism. Specifically, we construct a large dataset annotated with reflection patterns and design a two-stage training framework that unifies cold start and reinforcement learning within the self-reflection paradigm for real-world web-based environments, which enables the model to generate longer and more reflective tool-use trajectories. Our approach substantially extends tool-use chains and improves answer accuracy. Using a single 14B model, we achieve state-of-the-art results on HotpotQA and SimpleQA, with accuracies of 72.3% and 90.0%, respectively, and demonstrate strong generalization to out-of-distribution datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/99hgz/WebSeer

Efficiently solving problems with large action spaces using A* search has been of importance to the artificial intelligence community for decades. This is because the computation and memory requirements of A* search grow linearly with the size of the action space. This burden becomes even more apparent when A* search uses a heuristic function learned by computationally expensive function approximators, such as deep neural networks. To address this problem, we introduce Q* search, a search algorithm that uses deep Q-networks to guide search in order to take advantage of the fact that the sum of the transition costs and heuristic values of the children of a node can be computed with a single forward pass through a deep Q-network without explicitly generating those children. This significantly reduces computation time and requires only one node to be generated per iteration. We use Q* search to solve the Rubik's cube when formulated with a large action space that includes 1872 meta-actions and find that this 157-fold increase in the size of the action space incurs less than a 4-fold increase in computation time and less than a 3-fold increase in number of nodes generated when performing Q* search. Furthermore, Q* search is up to 129 times faster and generates up to 1288 times fewer nodes than A* search. Finally, although obtaining admissible heuristic functions from deep neural networks is an ongoing area of research, we prove that Q* search is guaranteed to find a shortest path given a heuristic function that neither overestimates the cost of a shortest path nor underestimates the transition cost.

Autonomous agents powered by language models (LMs) have demonstrated promise in their ability to perform decision-making tasks such as web automation. However, a key limitation remains: LMs, primarily optimized for natural language understanding and generation, struggle with multi-step reasoning, planning, and using environmental feedback when attempting to solve realistic computer tasks. Towards addressing this, we propose an inference-time search algorithm for LM agents to explicitly perform exploration and multi-step planning in interactive web environments. Our approach is a form of best-first tree search that operates within the actual environment space, and is complementary with most existing state-of-the-art agents. It is the first tree search algorithm for LM agents that shows effectiveness on realistic web tasks. On the challenging VisualWebArena benchmark, applying our search algorithm on top of a GPT-4o agent yields a 39.7% relative increase in success rate compared to the same baseline without search, setting a state-of-the-art success rate of 26.4%. On WebArena, search also yields a 28.0% relative improvement over a baseline agent, setting a competitive success rate of 19.2%. Our experiments highlight the effectiveness of search for web agents, and we demonstrate that performance scales with increased test-time compute. We conduct a thorough analysis of our results to highlight improvements from search, limitations, and promising directions for future work. Our code and models are publicly released at https://jykoh.com/search-agents.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive question answering and reasoning, yet their real-world deployment remains constrained by knowledge cutoff, hallucination, and limited interaction modalities. Augmenting LLMs with external search tools helps alleviate these issues, but it also exposes agents to a complex search environment in which small, plausible variations in query formulation can steer reasoning into unproductive trajectories and amplify errors. We present a systematic analysis that quantifies how environmental complexity induces fragile search behaviors and, in turn, degrades overall performance. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective approach to instantiate a search agent, RE-Searcher. During search, RE-Searcher explicitly articulates a concrete search goal and subsequently reflects on whether the retrieved evidence satisfies that goal. This combination of goal-oriented planning and self-reflection enables RE-Searcher to resist spurious cues in complex search environments and perform robust search. Extensive experiments show that our method improves search accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art results. Perturbation studies further demonstrate substantial resilience to noisy or misleading external signals, mitigating the fragility of the search process. We believe these findings offer practical guidance for integrating LLM-powered agents into more complex interactive environments and enabling more autonomous decision-making.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing LLM-based deep search agents. However, existing approaches primarily rely on binary outcome rewards, which fail to capture the comprehensiveness and factuality of agents' reasoning process, and often lead to undesirable behaviors such as shortcut exploitation and hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose Citation-aware Rubric Rewards (CaRR), a fine-grained reward framework for deep search agents that emphasizes reasoning comprehensiveness, factual grounding, and evidence connectivity. CaRR decomposes complex questions into verifiable single-hop rubrics and requires agents to satisfy these rubrics by explicitly identifying hidden entities, supporting them with correct citations, and constructing complete evidence chains that link to the predicted answer. We further introduce Citation-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (C-GRPO), which combines CaRR and outcome rewards for training robust deep search agents. Experiments show that C-GRPO consistently outperforms standard outcome-based RL baselines across multiple deep search benchmarks. Our analysis also validates that C-GRPO effectively discourages shortcut exploitation, promotes comprehensive, evidence-grounded reasoning, and exhibits strong generalization to open-ended deep research tasks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/THUDM/CaRR.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to autonomously call tools during reasoning, with search as the most common application. These models excel at multi-step reasoning tasks, but their safety properties are not well understood. In this study, we show that RL-trained search models inherit refusal from instruction tuning and often deflect harmful requests by turning them into safe queries. However, this safety is fragile. Two simple attacks, one that forces the model to begin response with search (Search attack), another that encourages models to repeatedly search (Multi-search attack), trigger cascades of harmful searches and answers. Across two model families (Qwen, Llama) with both local and web search, these attacks lower refusal rates by up to 60.0%, answer safety by 82.5%, and search-query safety by 82.4%. The attacks succeed by triggering models to generate harmful, request-mirroring search queries before they can generate the inherited refusal tokens. This exposes a core weakness of current RL training: it rewards continued generation of effective queries without accounting for their harmfulness. As a result, RL search models have vulnerabilities that users can easily exploit, making it urgent to develop safety-aware agentic RL pipelines optimising for safe search.

We provide a reproducible, end-to-end demonstration of vector search with OpenAI embeddings using Lucene on the popular MS MARCO passage ranking test collection. The main goal of our work is to challenge the prevailing narrative that a dedicated vector store is necessary to take advantage of recent advances in deep neural networks as applied to search. Quite the contrary, we show that hierarchical navigable small-world network (HNSW) indexes in Lucene are adequate to provide vector search capabilities in a standard bi-encoder architecture. This suggests that, from a simple cost-benefit analysis, there does not appear to be a compelling reason to introduce a dedicated vector store into a modern "AI stack" for search, since such applications have already received substantial investments in existing, widely deployed infrastructure.

Deep-Research agents, which integrate large language models (LLMs) with search tools, have shown success in improving the effectiveness of handling complex queries that require iterative search planning and reasoning over search results. Evaluations on current benchmarks like BrowseComp relies on black-box live web search APIs, have notable limitations in (1) fairness: dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder fair comparisons and reproducibility of deep research methods; (2) transparency: lack of control over the document corpus makes it difficult to isolate retriever contributions. In other words, the current evaluations may compare a complete deep research system at a given time, but they do not foster well-controlled experiments to provide insights into the capability of underlying deep research LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce BrowseComp-Plus, a benchmark derived from BrowseComp, employing a fixed, carefully curated corpus. Each query in BrowseComp-Plus includes human-verified supporting documents and mined challenging negatives, enabling controlled experimentation. The benchmark is shown to be effective in distinguishing the performance of deep research systems. For instance, the open-source model Search-R1, when paired with the BM25 retriever, achieves 3.86% accuracy, whereas the GPT-5 achieves 55.9%. Integrating the GPT-5 with the Qwen3-Embedding-8B retriever further enhances its accuracy to 70.1% with fewer search calls. This benchmark allows comprehensive evaluation and disentangled analysis of deep research agents and retrieval methods, fostering insights into retrieval effectiveness, citation accuracy, and context engineering in Deep-Research system.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but are limited by their static parametric knowledge, especially in knowledge-intensive task. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this by integrating external information. However, (1) traditional RAG struggles with complex query understanding, and (2) even search agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL), despite their promise, still face generalization and deployment challenges. To address these limitations, we propose QAgent, a unified agentic RAG framework that employs a search agent for adaptive retrieval. This agent optimizes its understanding of the query through interactive reasoning and retrieval. To facilitate real-world application, we focus on modular search agent for query understanding that are plug-and-play in complex systems. Secifically, the agent follows a multi-step decision process trained with RL to maximize retrieval quality and support accurate downstream answers. We further analyze the strengths and weaknesses of end-to-end RL and propose a strategy that focuses on effective retrieval, thereby enhancing generalization in LLM applications. Experiments show QAgent excels at QA and serves as a plug-and-play module for real-world deployment.

Recently, Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have demonstrated unique efficiency advantages, enabled by their inherently parallel decoding mechanism and flexible generation paradigm. Meanwhile, despite the rapid advancement of Search Agents, their practical deployment is constrained by a fundamental limitation, termed as 1) Latency Challenge: the serial execution of multi-round reasoning, tool calling, and tool response waiting under the ReAct agent paradigm induces severe end-to-end latency. Intuitively, dLLMs can leverage their distinctive strengths to optimize the operational efficiency of agents under the ReAct agent paradigm. Practically, existing dLLM backbones face the 2) Agent Ability Challenge. That is, existing dLLMs exhibit remarkably weak reasoning and tool-calling capabilities, preventing these advantages from being effectively realized in practice. In this paper, we propose DLLM-Searcher, an optimization framework for dLLM-based Search Agents. To solve the Agent Ability Challenge, we design a two-stage post-training pipeline encompassing Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning (Agentic SFT) and Agentic Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization Agentic VRPO, which enhances the backbone dLLM's information seeking and reasoning capabilities. To mitigate the Latency Challenge, we leverage the flexible generation mechanism of dLLMs and propose a novel agent paradigm termed Parallel-Reasoning and Acting P-ReAct. P-ReAct guides the model to prioritize decoding tool_call instructions, thereby allowing the model to keep thinking while waiting for the tool's return. Experimental results demonstrate that DLLM-Searcher achieves performance comparable to mainstream LLM-based search agents and P-ReAct delivers approximately 15% inference acceleration. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DLLM-Searcher-553C

Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with web search capabilities have demonstrated impressive potential for deep research tasks. However, current approaches predominantly rely on either manually engineered prompts (prompt engineering-based) with brittle performance or reinforcement learning within controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) environments (RAG-based) that fail to capture the complexities of real-world interaction. In this paper, we introduce DeepResearcher, the first comprehensive framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents through scaling reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments with authentic web search interactions. Unlike RAG-based approaches that assume all necessary information exists within a fixed corpus, our method trains agents to navigate the noisy, unstructured, and dynamic nature of the open web. We implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures and overcoming significant technical challenges. Extensive experiments on open-domain research tasks demonstrate that DeepResearcher achieves substantial improvements of up to 28.9 points over prompt engineering-based baselines and up to 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. Our qualitative analysis reveals emergent cognitive behaviors from end-to-end RL training, including the ability to formulate plans, cross-validate information from multiple sources, engage in self-reflection to redirect research, and maintain honesty when unable to find definitive answers. Our results highlight that end-to-end training in real-world web environments is not merely an implementation detail but a fundamental requirement for developing robust research capabilities aligned with real-world applications. We release DeepResearcher at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher.

Answering complex, long-context questions remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs) as it requires effective question clarifications and context retrieval. We propose Agentic Long-Context Understanding (AgenticLU), a framework designed to enhance an LLM's understanding of such queries by integrating targeted self-clarification with contextual grounding within an agentic workflow. At the core of AgenticLU is Chain-of-Clarifications (CoC), where models refine their understanding through self-generated clarification questions and corresponding contextual groundings. By scaling inference as a tree search where each node represents a CoC step, we achieve 97.8% answer recall on NarrativeQA with a search depth of up to three and a branching factor of eight. To amortize the high cost of this search process to training, we leverage the preference pairs for each step obtained by the CoC workflow and perform two-stage model finetuning: (1) supervised finetuning to learn effective decomposition strategies, and (2) direct preference optimization to enhance reasoning quality. This enables AgenticLU models to generate clarifications and retrieve relevant context effectively and efficiently in a single inference pass. Extensive experiments across seven long-context tasks demonstrate that AgenticLU significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-context LLMs, achieving robust multi-hop reasoning while sustaining consistent performance as context length grows.

Modern long-context large language models (LLMs) perform well on synthetic "needle-in-a-haystack" (NIAH) benchmarks, but such tests overlook how noisy contexts arise from biased retrieval and agentic workflows. We argue that haystack engineering is necessary to construct noisy long contexts that faithfully capture key real-world factors -- distraction from heterogeneous biased retrievers and cascading errors in agentic workflows -- to test models' long-context robustness. We instantiate it through HaystackCraft, a new NIAH benchmark built on the full English Wikipedia hyperlink network with multi-hop questions. HaystackCraft evaluates how heterogeneous retrieval strategies (e.g., sparse, dense, hybrid, and graph-based) affect distractor composition, haystack ordering, and downstream LLM performance. HaystackCraft further extends NIAH to dynamic, LLM-dependent settings that simulate agentic operations, where models refine queries, reflect on their past reasonings, and decide when to stop. Experiments with 15 long-context models show that (1) while stronger dense retrievers can introduce more challenging distractors, graph-based reranking simultaneously improves retrieval effectiveness and mitigates more harmful distractors; (2) in agentic tests, even advanced models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 suffer cascading failures from self-generated distractors or struggle to perform early stops. These results highlight persistent challenges in agentic long-context reasoning and establish HaystackCraft as a valuable testbed for future progress.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many reasoning tasks but struggle with knowledge-intensive queries due to their inability to dynamically access up-to-date or domain-specific information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution, enabling LLMs to ground their responses in external sources. However, existing RAG methods lack fine-grained control over both the query and source sides, often resulting in noisy retrieval and shallow reasoning. In this work, we introduce DeepSieve, an agentic RAG framework that incorporates information sieving via LLM-as-a-knowledge-router. DeepSieve decomposes complex queries into structured sub-questions and recursively routes each to the most suitable knowledge source, filtering irrelevant information through a multi-stage distillation process. Our design emphasizes modularity, transparency, and adaptability, leveraging recent advances in agentic system design. Experiments on multi-hop QA tasks across heterogeneous sources demonstrate improved reasoning depth, retrieval precision, and interpretability over conventional RAG approaches. Our codes are available at https://github.com/MinghoKwok/DeepSieve.

Large language model (LLM)-based search agents have proven promising for addressing knowledge-intensive problems by incorporating information retrieval capabilities. Existing works largely focus on optimizing the reasoning paradigms of search agents, yet the quality of intermediate search queries during reasoning remains overlooked. As a result, the generated queries often remain inaccurate, leading to unexpected retrieval results and ultimately limiting search agents' overall effectiveness. To mitigate this issue, we introduce SmartSearch, a framework built upon two key mechanisms: (1) Process rewards, which provide fine-grained supervision for the quality of each intermediate search query through Dual-Level Credit Assessment. (2) Query refinement, which promotes the optimization of query generation by selectively refining low-quality search queries and regenerating subsequent search rounds based on these refinements. To enable the search agent to progressively internalize the ability to improve query quality under the guidance of process rewards, we design a three-stage curriculum learning framework. This framework guides the agent through a progression from imitation, to alignment, and ultimately to generalization. Experimental results show that SmartSearch consistently surpasses existing baselines, and additional quantitative analyses further confirm its significant gains in both search efficiency and query quality. The code is available at https://github.com/MYVAE/SmartSearch.

Information seeking and integration is a complex cognitive task that consumes enormous time and effort. Inspired by the remarkable progress of Large Language Models, recent works attempt to solve this task by combining LLMs and search engines. However, these methods still obtain unsatisfying performance due to three challenges: (1) complex requests often cannot be accurately and completely retrieved by the search engine once (2) corresponding information to be integrated is spread over multiple web pages along with massive noise, and (3) a large number of web pages with long contents may quickly exceed the maximum context length of LLMs. Inspired by the cognitive process when humans solve these problems, we introduce MindSearch to mimic the human minds in web information seeking and integration, which can be instantiated by a simple yet effective LLM-based multi-agent framework. The WebPlanner models the human mind of multi-step information seeking as a dynamic graph construction process: it decomposes the user query into atomic sub-questions as nodes in the graph and progressively extends the graph based on the search result from WebSearcher. Tasked with each sub-question, WebSearcher performs hierarchical information retrieval with search engines and collects valuable information for WebPlanner. The multi-agent design of MindSearch enables the whole framework to seek and integrate information parallelly from larger-scale (e.g., more than 300) web pages in 3 minutes, which is worth 3 hours of human effort. MindSearch demonstrates significant improvement in the response quality in terms of depth and breadth, on both close-set and open-set QA problems. Besides, responses from MindSearch based on InternLM2.5-7B are preferable by humans to ChatGPT-Web and Perplexity.ai applications, which implies that MindSearch can already deliver a competitive solution to the proprietary AI search engine.

Learning to search is the task of building artificial agents that learn to autonomously use a search box to find information. So far, it has been shown that current language models can learn symbolic query reformulation policies, in combination with traditional term-based retrieval, but fall short of outperforming neural retrievers. We extend the previous learning to search setup to a hybrid environment, which accepts discrete query refinement operations, after a first-pass retrieval step via a dual encoder. Experiments on the BEIR task show that search agents, trained via behavioral cloning, outperform the underlying search system based on a combined dual encoder retriever and cross encoder reranker. Furthermore, we find that simple heuristic Hybrid Retrieval Environments (HRE) can improve baseline performance by several nDCG points. The search agent based on HRE (HARE) matches state-of-the-art performance, balanced in both zero-shot and in-domain evaluations, via interpretable actions, and at twice the speed.

Search agents are language models (LMs) that reason and search knowledge bases (or the web) to answer questions; recent methods supervise only the final answer accuracy using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Most RLVR search agents tackle general-domain QA, which limits their relevance to technical AI systems in science, engineering, and medicine. In this work we propose training agents to search and reason over scientific papers -- this tests technical question-answering, it is directly relevant to real scientists, and the capabilities will be crucial to future AI Scientist systems. Concretely, we release a search corpus of 16 million biomedical paper abstracts and construct a challenging factoid QA dataset called PaperSearchQA with 60k samples answerable from the corpus, along with benchmarks. We train search agents in this environment to outperform non-RL retrieval baselines; we also perform further quantitative analysis and observe interesting agent behaviors like planning, reasoning, and self-verification. Our corpus, datasets, and benchmarks are usable with the popular Search-R1 codebase for RLVR training and released on https://huggingface.co/collections/jmhb/papersearchqa. Finally, our data creation methods are scalable and easily extendable to other scientific domains.

Search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training these agents to perform complex, multi-step reasoning. However, prior RL-based methods often rely on sparse or rule-based rewards, which can lead agents to commit to suboptimal or erroneous reasoning paths without the ability to recover. To address these limitations, we propose ReSeek, a novel self-correcting framework for training search agents. Our framework introduces a self-correction mechanism that empowers the agent to dynamically identify and recover from erroneous search paths during an episode. By invoking a special JUDGE action, the agent can judge the information and re-plan its search strategy. To guide this process, we design a dense, instructive process reward function, which decomposes into a correctness reward for retrieving factual information and a utility reward for finding information genuinely useful for the query. Furthermore, to mitigate the risk of data contamination in existing datasets, we introduce FictionalHot, a new and challenging benchmark with recently curated questions requiring complex reasoning. Being intuitively reasonable and practically simple, extensive experiments show that agents trained with ReSeek significantly outperform SOTA baselines in task success rate and path faithfulness.

Leveraging multiple Large Language Models(LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network(ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative "team" focused on a specific subtask. Agentic Neural Network follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase-Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase-Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables ANN to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across four benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. Our findings indicate that ANN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for multi-agent systems, combining the collaborative capabilities of LLMs with the efficiency and flexibility of neural network principles. We plan to open-source the entire framework.

Retrieval plays a central role in multi-hop question answering (QA), where answering complex questions requires gathering multiple pieces of evidence. We introduce an Agentic Retrieval System that leverages large language models (LLMs) in a structured loop to retrieve relevant evidence with high precision and recall. Our framework consists of three specialized agents: a Question Analyzer that decomposes a multi-hop question into sub-questions, a Selector that identifies the most relevant context for each sub-question (focusing on precision), and an Adder that brings in any missing evidence (focusing on recall). The iterative interaction between Selector and Adder yields a compact yet comprehensive set of supporting passages. In particular, it achieves higher retrieval accuracy while filtering out distracting content, enabling downstream QA models to surpass full-context answer accuracy while relying on significantly less irrelevant information. Experiments on four multi-hop QA benchmarks -- HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, MuSiQue, and MultiHopRAG -- demonstrates that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines.

The agency expected of Agentic Large Language Models goes beyond answering correctly, requiring autonomy to set goals and decide what to explore. We term this investigatory intelligence, distinguishing it from executional intelligence, which merely completes assigned tasks. Data Science provides a natural testbed, as real-world analysis starts from raw data rather than explicit queries, yet few benchmarks focus on it. To address this, we introduce Deep Data Research (DDR), an open-ended task where LLMs autonomously extract key insights from databases, and DDR-Bench, a large-scale, checklist-based benchmark that enables verifiable evaluation. Results show that while frontier models display emerging agency, long-horizon exploration remains challenging. Our analysis highlights that effective investigatory intelligence depends not only on agent scaffolding or merely scaling, but also on intrinsic strategies of agentic models.

We investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to serve as efficient simulators for agentic search tasks in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby reducing dependence on costly interactions with external search engines. To this end, we first quantify the intrinsic search capability of LLMs via structured prompting and repeated sampling, which we term Self-Search. Our results reveal that LLMs exhibit strong scaling behavior with respect to the inference budget, achieving high pass@k on question-answering benchmarks, including the challenging BrowseComp task. Building on these observations, we introduce Self-Search RL (SSRL), which enhances LLMs' Self-Search capability through format-based and rule-based rewards. SSRL enables models to iteratively refine their knowledge utilization internally, without requiring access to external tools. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that SSRL-trained policy models provide a cost-effective and stable environment for search-driven RL training, reducing reliance on external search engines and facilitating robust sim-to-real transfer. We draw the following conclusions: 1) LLMs possess world knowledge that can be effectively elicited to achieve high performance; 2) SSRL demonstrates the potential of leveraging internal knowledge to reduce hallucination; 3) SSRL-trained models integrate seamlessly with external search engines without additional effort. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs to support more scalable RL agent training.

Recent advancements in LLM-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex, knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external tools. Among diverse choices of tools, search tools play a pivotal role in accessing vast external knowledge. However, open-source agents still fall short of achieving expert-level Search Intelligence, the ability to resolve ambiguous queries, generate precise searches, analyze results, and conduct thorough exploration. Existing approaches fall short in scalability, efficiency, and data quality. For example, small turn limits in existing online RL methods, e.g. <=10, restrict complex strategy learning. This paper introduces ASearcher, an open-source project for large-scale RL training of search agents. Our key contributions include: (1) Scalable fully asynchronous RL training that enables long-horizon search while maintaining high training efficiency. (2) A prompt-based LLM agent that autonomously synthesizes high-quality and challenging QAs, creating a large-scale QA dataset. Through RL training, our prompt-based QwQ-32B agent achieves substantial improvements, with 46.7% and 20.8% Avg@4 gains on xBench and GAIA, respectively. Notably, our agent exhibits extreme long-horizon search, with tool calls exceeding 40 turns and output tokens exceeding 150k during training time. With a simple agent design and no external LLMs, ASearcher-Web-QwQ achieves Avg@4 scores of 42.1 on xBench and 52.8 on GAIA, surpassing existing open-source 32B agents. We open-source our models, training data, and codes in https://github.com/inclusionAI/ASearcher.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable agentic systems trained with reinforcement learning (RL) over multi-turn interaction trajectories, but practical deployment is bottlenecked by rapidly growing textual histories that inflate token budgets and memory usage. We introduce AgentOCR, a framework that exploits the superior information density of visual tokens by representing the accumulated observation-action history as a compact rendered image. To make multi-turn rollouts scalable, AgentOCR proposes segment optical caching. By decomposing history into hashable segments and maintaining a visual cache, this mechanism eliminates redundant re-rendering. Beyond fixed rendering, AgentOCR introduces agentic self-compression, where the agent actively emits a compression rate and is trained with compression-aware reward to adaptively balance task success and token efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on challenging agentic benchmarks, ALFWorld and search-based QA. Remarkably, results demonstrate that AgentOCR preserves over 95\% of text-based agent performance while substantially reducing token consumption (>50\%), yielding consistent token and memory efficiency. Our further analysis validates a 20x rendering speedup from segment optical caching and the effective strategic balancing of self-compression.

As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.

Designing effective agentic systems requires the seamless composition and integration of agents, tools, and models within dynamic and uncertain environments. Most existing methods rely on static, semantic retrieval approaches for tool or agent discovery. However, effective reuse and composition of existing components remain challenging due to incomplete capability descriptions and the limitations of retrieval methods. Component selection suffers because the decisions are not based on capability, cost, and real-time utility. To address these challenges, we introduce a structured, automated framework for agentic system composition that is inspired by the knapsack problem. Our framework enables a composer agent to systematically identify, select, and assemble an optimal set of agentic components by jointly considering performance, budget constraints, and compatibility. By dynamically testing candidate components and modeling their utility in real-time, our approach streamlines the assembly of agentic systems and facilitates scalable reuse of resources. Empirical evaluation with Claude 3.5 Sonnet across five benchmarking datasets shows that our online-knapsack-based composer consistently lies on the Pareto frontier, achieving higher success rates at significantly lower component costs compared to our baselines. In the single-agent setup, the online knapsack composer shows a success rate improvement of up to 31.6% in comparison to the retrieval baselines. In multi-agent systems, the online knapsack composer increases success rate from 37% to 87% when agents are selected from an agent inventory of 100+ agents. The substantial performance gap confirms the robust adaptability of our method across diverse domains and budget constraints.

The rapid advancement of large language models has fundamentally shifted the bottleneck in AI development from computational power to data availability-with countless valuable datasets remaining hidden across specialized repositories, research appendices, and domain platforms. As reasoning capabilities and deep research methodologies continue to evolve, a critical question emerges: can AI agents transcend conventional search to systematically discover any dataset that meets specific user requirements, enabling truly autonomous demand-driven data curation? We introduce DatasetResearch, the first comprehensive benchmark evaluating AI agents' ability to discover and synthesize datasets from 208 real-world demands across knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks. Our tri-dimensional evaluation framework reveals a stark reality: even advanced deep research systems achieve only 22% score on our challenging DatasetResearch-pro subset, exposing the vast gap between current capabilities and perfect dataset discovery. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental dichotomy-search agents excel at knowledge tasks through retrieval breadth, while synthesis agents dominate reasoning challenges via structured generation-yet both catastrophically fail on "corner cases" outside existing distributions. These findings establish the first rigorous baseline for dataset discovery agents and illuminate the path toward AI systems capable of finding any dataset in the digital universe. Our benchmark and comprehensive analysis provide the foundation for the next generation of self-improving AI systems and are publicly available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DatasetResearch.

Agentic language model (LM) systems power modern applications like "Deep Research" and "Claude Code," and leverage multi-LM architectures to overcome context limitations. Beneath their apparent diversity lies a recurring pattern: smaller "compressor" LMs (that can even run locally) distill raw context into compact text that is then consumed by larger "predictor" LMs. Despite their popularity, the design of compressor-predictor systems remains largely ad hoc, with little guidance on how compressor and predictor choices shape downstream performance. In practice, attributing gains to compression versus prediction requires costly, task-specific pairwise sweeps. We argue that these agentic system design questions are, at root, information-theoretic. Viewing the compressor LM as a noisy channel, we introduce a simple estimator of mutual information between the context and its compression to quantify compression quality in a task-independent way. We show that mutual information strongly predicts downstream performance, independent of any specific task. Through an information-theoretic framework, we perform a comprehensive empirical analysis across five datasets and three model families. Results reveal that larger compressors not only are more accurate, but also more token-efficient, conveying more bits of information per token. A 7B Qwen-2.5 compressor, for instance, is 1.6times more accurate, 4.6times more concise, and conveys 5.5times more bits of mutual information per token than its 1.5B sibling. Across datasets, scaling compressors is substantially more effective than scaling predictors, enabling larger on-device compressors to pair with smaller cloud predictors. Applied to a Deep Research system, these principles enable local compressors as small as 3B parameters to recover 99% of frontier-LM accuracy at 26% of API costs.

Deep search agents powered by large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in multi-step retrieval, reasoning, and long-horizon task execution. However, their practical failures often stem from the lack of mechanisms to monitor and regulate reasoning and retrieval states as tasks evolve under uncertainty. Insights from cognitive neuroscience suggest that human metacognition is hierarchically organized, integrating fast anomaly detection with selectively triggered, experience-driven reflection. In this work, we propose Deep Search with Meta-Cognitive Monitoring (DS-MCM), a deep search framework augmented with an explicit hierarchical metacognitive monitoring mechanism. DS-MCM integrates a Fast Consistency Monitor, which performs lightweight checks on the alignment between external evidence and internal reasoning confidence, and a Slow Experience-Driven Monitor, which is selectively activated to guide corrective intervention based on experience memory from historical agent trajectories. By embedding monitoring directly into the reasoning-retrieval loop, DS-MCM determines both when intervention is warranted and how corrective actions should be informed by prior experience. Experiments across multiple deep search benchmarks and backbone models demonstrate that DS-MCM consistently improves performance and robustness.

Generative AI search is reshaping information retrieval by offering end-to-end answers to complex queries, reducing users' reliance on manually browsing and summarizing multiple web pages. However, while this paradigm enhances convenience, it disrupts the feedback-driven improvement loop that has historically powered the evolution of traditional Web search. Web search can continuously improve their ranking models by collecting large-scale, fine-grained user feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell time) at the document level. In contrast, generative AI search operates through a much longer search pipeline, spanning query decomposition, document retrieval, and answer generation, yet typically receives only coarse-grained feedback on the final answer. This introduces a feedback loop disconnect, where user feedback for the final output cannot be effectively mapped back to specific system components, making it difficult to improve each intermediate stage and sustain the feedback loop. In this paper, we envision NExT-Search, a next-generation paradigm designed to reintroduce fine-grained, process-level feedback into generative AI search. NExT-Search integrates two complementary modes: User Debug Mode, which allows engaged users to intervene at key stages; and Shadow User Mode, where a personalized user agent simulates user preferences and provides AI-assisted feedback for less interactive users. Furthermore, we envision how these feedback signals can be leveraged through online adaptation, which refines current search outputs in real-time, and offline update, which aggregates interaction logs to periodically fine-tune query decomposition, retrieval, and generation models. By restoring human control over key stages of the generative AI search pipeline, we believe NExT-Search offers a promising direction for building feedback-rich AI search systems that can evolve continuously alongside human feedback.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable results in complex multi-step tasks, such as mathematical reasoning and agentic software engineering. However, they often struggle to maintain consistent performance across multiple solution attempts. One effective approach to narrow the gap between average-case and best-case performance is guided test-time search, which explores multiple solution paths to identify the most promising one. Unfortunately, effective search techniques (e.g. MCTS) are often unsuitable for non-serializable RL environments, such as Docker containers, where intermediate environment states cannot be easily saved and restored. We investigate two complementary search strategies applicable to such environments: 1-step lookahead and trajectory selection, both guided by a learned action-value function estimator. On the SWE-bench Verified benchmark, a key testbed for agentic software engineering, we find these methods to double the average success rate of a fine-tuned Qwen-72B model, achieving 40.8%, the new state-of-the-art for open-weights models. Additionally, we show that these techniques are transferable to more advanced closed models, yielding similar improvements with GPT-4o.

As information grows exponentially, enterprises face increasing pressure to transform unstructured data into coherent, actionable insights. While autonomous agents show promise, they often struggle with domain-specific nuances, intent alignment, and enterprise integration. We present Enterprise Deep Research (EDR), a multi-agent system that integrates (1) a Master Planning Agent for adaptive query decomposition, (2) four specialized search agents (General, Academic, GitHub, LinkedIn), (3) an extensible MCP-based tool ecosystem supporting NL2SQL, file analysis, and enterprise workflows, (4) a Visualization Agent for data-driven insights, and (5) a reflection mechanism that detects knowledge gaps and updates research direction with optional human-in-the-loop steering guidance. These components enable automated report generation, real-time streaming, and seamless enterprise deployment, as validated on internal datasets. On open-ended benchmarks including DeepResearch Bench and DeepConsult, EDR outperforms state-of-the-art agentic systems without any human steering. We release the EDR framework and benchmark trajectories to advance research on multi-agent reasoning applications. Code at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/enterprise-deep-research and Dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/EDR-200

Agentic tasks, which require multi-step problem solving with autonomy, tool use, and adaptive reasoning, are becoming increasingly central to the advancement of NLP and AI. However, existing instruction data lacks tool interaction, and current agentic benchmarks rely on costly human annotation, limiting their scalability. We introduce TaskCraft, an automated workflow for generating difficulty-scalable, multi-tool, and verifiable agentic tasks with execution trajectories. TaskCraft expands atomic tasks using depth-based and width-based extensions to create structurally and hierarchically complex challenges. Empirical results show that these tasks improve prompt optimization in the generation workflow and enhance supervised fine-tuning of agentic foundation models. We present a large-scale synthetic dataset of approximately 36,000 tasks with varying difficulty to support future research on agent tuning and evaluation.

Deep research agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are rapidly advancing; yet, their performance often plateaus when generating complex, long-form research reports using generic test-time scaling algorithms. Drawing inspiration from the iterative nature of human research, which involves cycles of searching, reasoning, and revision, we propose the Test-Time Diffusion Deep Researcher (TTD-DR). This novel framework conceptualizes research report generation as a diffusion process. TTD-DR initiates this process with a preliminary draft, an updatable skeleton that serves as an evolving foundation to guide the research direction. The draft is then iteratively refined through a "denoising" process, which is dynamically informed by a retrieval mechanism that incorporates external information at each step. The core process is further enhanced by a self-evolutionary algorithm applied to each component of the agentic workflow, ensuring the generation of high-quality context for the diffusion process. This draft-centric design makes the report writing process more timely and coherent while reducing information loss during the iterative search process. We demonstrate that our TTD-DR achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide array of benchmarks that require intensive search and multi-hop reasoning, significantly outperforming existing deep research agents.

We introduce V-Agent, a novel multi-agent platform designed for advanced video search and interactive user-system conversations. By fine-tuning a vision-language model (VLM) with a small video preference dataset and enhancing it with a retrieval vector from an image-text retrieval model, we overcome the limitations of traditional text-based retrieval systems in multimodal scenarios. The VLM-based retrieval model independently embeds video frames and audio transcriptions from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module into a shared multimodal representation space, enabling V-Agent to interpret both visual and spoken content for context-aware video search. This system consists of three agents-a routing agent, a search agent, and a chat agent-that work collaboratively to address user intents by refining search outputs and communicating with users. The search agent utilizes the VLM-based retrieval model together with an additional re-ranking module to further enhance video retrieval quality. Our proposed framework demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the MultiVENT 2.0 benchmark, highlighting its potential for both academic research and real-world applications. The retrieval model and demo videos are available at https://huggingface.co/NCSOFT/multimodal-embedding.

Retrieval is being redefined by agentic AI, demanding multimodal reasoning beyond conventional similarity-based paradigms. Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) exemplifies this shift as each query combines a reference image with textual modifications, requiring compositional understanding across modalities. While embedding-based CIR methods have achieved progress, they remain narrow in perspective, capturing limited cross-modal cues and lacking semantic reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce XR, a training-free multi-agent framework that reframes retrieval as a progressively coordinated reasoning process. It orchestrates three specialized types of agents: imagination agents synthesize target representations through cross-modal generation, similarity agents perform coarse filtering via hybrid matching, and question agents verify factual consistency through targeted reasoning for fine filtering. Through progressive multi-agent coordination, XR iteratively refines retrieval to meet both semantic and visual query constraints, achieving up to a 38% gain over strong training-free and training-based baselines on FashionIQ, CIRR, and CIRCO, while ablations show each agent is essential. Code is available: https://01yzzyu.github.io/xr.github.io/.

We introduce a novel large language model (LLM)-driven agent framework, which iteratively refines queries and filters contextual evidence by leveraging dynamically evolving knowledge. A defining feature of the system is its decoupling of external sources from an internal knowledge cache that is progressively updated to guide both query generation and evidence selection. This design mitigates bias-reinforcement loops and enables dynamic, trackable search exploration paths, thereby optimizing the trade-off between exploring diverse information and maintaining accuracy through autonomous agent decision-making. Our approach is evaluated on a broad range of open-domain question answering benchmarks, including multi-step tasks that mirror real-world scenarios where integrating information from multiple sources is critical, especially given the vulnerabilities of LLMs that lack explicit reasoning or planning capabilities. The results show that the proposed system not only outperforms single-step baselines regardless of task difficulty but also, compared to conventional iterative retrieval methods, demonstrates pronounced advantages in complex tasks through precise evidence-based reasoning and enhanced efficiency. The proposed system supports both competitive and collaborative sharing of updated context, enabling multi-agent extension. The benefits of multi-agent configurations become especially prominent as task difficulty increases. The number of convergence steps scales with task difficulty, suggesting cost-effective scalability.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based search agents have shown remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks by dynamically decomposing problems and addressing them through interleaved reasoning and retrieval. However, this interleaved paradigm introduces substantial efficiency bottlenecks. First, we observe that both highly accurate and overly approximate retrieval methods degrade system efficiency: exact search incurs significant retrieval overhead, while coarse retrieval requires additional reasoning steps during generation. Second, we identify inefficiencies in system design, including improper scheduling and frequent retrieval stalls, which lead to cascading latency -- where even minor delays in retrieval amplify end-to-end inference time. To address these challenges, we introduce SearchAgent-X, a high-efficiency inference framework for LLM-based search agents. SearchAgent-X leverages high-recall approximate retrieval and incorporates two key techniques: priority-aware scheduling and non-stall retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SearchAgent-X consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems such as vLLM and HNSW-based retrieval across diverse tasks, achieving up to 3.4times higher throughput and 5times lower latency, without compromising generation quality. SearchAgent-X is available at https://github.com/tiannuo-yang/SearchAgent-X.

Frontier language models have demonstrated strong reasoning and long-horizon tool-use capabilities. However, existing RAG systems fail to leverage these capabilities. They still rely on two paradigms: (1) designing an algorithm that retrieves passages in a single shot and concatenates them into the model's input, or (2) predefining a workflow and prompting the model to execute it step-by-step. Neither paradigm allows the model to participate in retrieval decisions, preventing efficient scaling with model improvements. In this paper, we introduce A-RAG, an Agentic RAG framework that exposes hierarchical retrieval interfaces directly to the model. A-RAG provides three retrieval tools: keyword search, semantic search, and chunk read, enabling the agent to adaptively search and retrieve information across multiple granularities. Experiments on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks show that A-RAG consistently outperforms existing approaches with comparable or lower retrieved tokens, demonstrating that A-RAG effectively leverages model capabilities and dynamically adapts to different RAG tasks. We further systematically study how A-RAG scales with model size and test-time compute. We will release our code and evaluation suite to facilitate future research. Code and evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/Ayanami0730/arag.

We introduce Youtu-LLM, a lightweight yet powerful language model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with native agentic intelligence. Unlike typical small models that rely on distillation, Youtu-LLM (1.96B) is pre-trained from scratch to systematically cultivate reasoning and planning capabilities. The key technical advancements are as follows: (1) Compact Architecture with Long-Context Support: Built on a dense Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) architecture with a novel STEM-oriented vocabulary, Youtu-LLM supports a 128k context window. This design enables robust long-context reasoning and state tracking within a minimal memory footprint, making it ideal for long-horizon agent and reasoning tasks. (2) Principled "Commonsense-STEM-Agent" Curriculum: We curated a massive corpus of approximately 11T tokens and implemented a multi-stage training strategy. By progressively shifting the pre-training data distribution from general commonsense to complex STEM and agentic tasks, we ensure the model acquires deep cognitive abilities rather than superficial alignment. (3) Scalable Agentic Mid-training: Specifically for the agentic mid-training, we employ diverse data construction schemes to synthesize rich and varied trajectories across math, coding, and tool-use domains. This high-quality data enables the model to internalize planning and reflection behaviors effectively. Extensive evaluations show that Youtu-LLM sets a new state-of-the-art for sub-2B LLMs. On general benchmarks, it achieves competitive performance against larger models, while on agent-specific tasks, it significantly surpasses existing SOTA baselines, demonstrating that lightweight models can possess strong intrinsic agentic capabilities.

Video question answering (VideoQA) enables machines to extract and comprehend key information from videos through natural language interaction, which is a critical step towards achieving intelligence. However, the demand for a thorough understanding of videos and high computational costs still limit the widespread applications of VideoQA. To address it, we propose Agentic Keyframe Search (AKeyS), a simple yet powerful algorithm for identifying keyframes in the VideoQA task. It can effectively distinguish key information from redundant, irrelevant content by leveraging modern language agents to direct classical search algorithms. Specifically, we first segment the video and organize it as a tree structure. Then, AKeyS uses a language agent to estimate heuristics and movement costs while dynamically expanding nodes. Finally, the agent determines if sufficient keyframes have been collected based on termination conditions and provides answers. Extensive experiments on the EgoSchema and NExT-QA datasets show that AKeyS outperforms all previous methods with the highest keyframe searching efficiency, which means it can accurately identify key information and conduct effective visual reasoning with minimal computational overhead. For example, on the EgoSchema subset, it achieves 1.8% higher accuracy while processing only 43.5% of the frames compared to VideoTree. We believe that AKeyS represents a significant step towards building intelligent agents for video understanding. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/fansunqi/AKeyS.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced LLMs by incorporating external information. However, prevailing agentic RAG approaches are constrained by a critical limitation: they treat the retrieval process as a black-box querying operation. This confines agents' actions to query issuing, hindering its ability to tackle complex information-seeking tasks. To address this, we introduce Interact-RAG, a new paradigm that elevates the LLM agent from a passive query issuer into an active manipulator of the retrieval process. We dismantle the black-box with a Corpus Interaction Engine, equipping the agent with a set of action primitives for fine-grained control over information retrieval. To further empower the agent on the entire RAG pipeline, we first develop a reasoning-enhanced workflow, which enables both zero-shot execution and the synthesis of interaction trajectories. We then leverage this synthetic data to train a fully autonomous end-to-end agent via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), followed by refinement with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate that Interact-RAG significantly outperforms other advanced methods, validating the efficacy of our reasoning-interaction strategy.

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can solve complex tasks through agentic reasoning, their capabilities remain largely constrained to text-oriented chain-of-thought or isolated tool invocation. They fail to exhibit the human-like proficiency required to seamlessly interleave dynamic tool manipulation with continuous reasoning, particularly in knowledge-intensive and visually complex scenarios that demand coordinated external tools such as search and image cropping. In this work, we introduce SenseNova-MARS, a novel Multimodal Agentic Reasoning and Search framework that empowers VLMs with interleaved visual reasoning and tool-use capabilities via reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, SenseNova-MARS dynamically integrates the image search, text search, and image crop tools to tackle fine-grained and knowledge-intensive visual understanding challenges. In the RL stage, we propose the Batch-Normalized Group Sequence Policy Optimization (BN-GSPO) algorithm to improve the training stability and advance the model's ability to invoke tools and reason effectively. To comprehensively evaluate the agentic VLMs on complex visual tasks, we introduce the HR-MMSearch benchmark, the first search-oriented benchmark composed of high-resolution images with knowledge-intensive and search-driven questions. Experiments demonstrate that SenseNova-MARS achieves state-of-the-art performance on open-source search and fine-grained image understanding benchmarks. Specifically, on search-oriented benchmarks, SenseNova-MARS-8B scores 67.84 on MMSearch and 41.64 on HR-MMSearch, surpassing proprietary models such as Gemini-3-Flash and GPT-5. SenseNova-MARS represents a promising step toward agentic VLMs by providing effective and robust tool-use capabilities. To facilitate further research in this field, we will release all code, models, and datasets.

Neural architecture search (NAS) finds high performing networks for a given task. Yet the results of NAS are fairly prosaic; they did not e.g. create a shift from convolutional structures to transformers. This is not least because the search spaces in NAS often aren't diverse enough to include such transformations a priori. Instead, for NAS to provide greater potential for fundamental design shifts, we need a novel expressive search space design which is built from more fundamental operations. To this end, we introduce einspace, a search space based on a parameterised probabilistic context-free grammar. Our space is versatile, supporting architectures of various sizes and complexities, while also containing diverse network operations which allow it to model convolutions, attention components and more. It contains many existing competitive architectures, and provides flexibility for discovering new ones. Using this search space, we perform experiments to find novel architectures as well as improvements on existing ones on the diverse Unseen NAS datasets. We show that competitive architectures can be obtained by searching from scratch, and we consistently find large improvements when initialising the search with strong baselines. We believe that this work is an important advancement towards a transformative NAS paradigm where search space expressivity and strategic search initialisation play key roles.

Agentic multimodal models should not only comprehend text and images, but also actively invoke external tools, such as code execution environments and web search, and integrate these operations into reasoning. In this work, we introduce DeepEyesV2 and explore how to build an agentic multimodal model from the perspectives of data construction, training methods, and model evaluation. We observe that direct reinforcement learning alone fails to induce robust tool-use behavior. This phenomenon motivates a two-stage training pipeline: a cold-start stage to establish tool-use patterns, and reinforcement learning stage to further refine tool invocation. We curate a diverse, moderately challenging training dataset, specifically including examples where tool use is beneficial. We further introduce RealX-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate real-world multimodal reasoning, which inherently requires the integration of multiple capabilities, including perception, search, and reasoning. We evaluate DeepEyesV2 on RealX-Bench and other representative benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness across real-world understanding, mathematical reasoning, and search-intensive tasks. Moreover, DeepEyesV2 exhibits task-adaptive tool invocation, tending to use image operations for perception tasks and numerical computations for reasoning tasks. Reinforcement learning further enables complex tool combinations and allows model to selectively invoke tools based on context. We hope our study can provide guidance for community in developing agentic multimodal models.

Recent advances in deep-research agents have shown promise for autonomous knowledge construction through dynamic reasoning over external sources. However, existing approaches rely on a mono-contextual paradigm that accumulates all information in a single, expanding context window, leading to context suffocation and noise contamination that limit their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks. We introduce IterResearch, a novel iterative deep-research paradigm that reformulates long-horizon research as a Markov Decision Process with strategic workspace reconstruction. By maintaining an evolving report as memory and periodically synthesizing insights, our approach preserves consistent reasoning capacity across arbitrary exploration depths. We further develop Efficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (EAPO), a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes efficient exploration through geometric reward discounting and enables stable distributed training via adaptive downsampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterResearch achieves substantial improvements over existing open-source agents with average +14.5pp across six benchmarks and narrows the gap with frontier proprietary systems. Remarkably, our paradigm exhibits unprecedented interaction scaling, extending to 2048 interactions with dramatic performance gains (from 3.5\% to 42.5\%), and serves as an effective prompting strategy, improving frontier models by up to 19.2pp over ReAct on long-horizon tasks. These findings position IterResearch as a versatile solution for long-horizon reasoning, effective both as a trained agent and as a prompting paradigm for frontier models.

Software engineers operating in complex and dynamic environments must continuously adapt to evolving requirements, learn iteratively from experience, and reconsider their approaches based on new insights. However, current large language model (LLM)-based software agents often rely on rigid processes and tend to repeat ineffective actions without the capacity to evaluate their performance or adapt their strategies over time. To address these challenges, we propose SWE-Search, a multi-agent framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a self-improvement mechanism to enhance software agents' performance on repository-level software tasks. SWE-Search extends traditional MCTS by incorporating a hybrid value function that leverages LLMs for both numerical value estimation and qualitative evaluation. This enables self-feedback loops where agents iteratively refine their strategies based on both quantitative numerical evaluations and qualitative natural language assessments of pursued trajectories. The framework includes a SWE-Agent for adaptive exploration, a Value Agent for iterative feedback, and a Discriminator Agent that facilitates multi-agent debate for collaborative decision-making. Applied to the SWE-bench benchmark, our approach demonstrates a 23% relative improvement in performance across five models compared to standard open-source agents without MCTS. Our analysis reveals how performance scales with increased search depth and identifies key factors that facilitate effective self-evaluation in software agents. This work highlights the potential of self-evaluation driven search techniques to enhance agent reasoning and planning in complex, dynamic software engineering environments.

We introduce AgentSynth, a scalable and cost-efficient pipeline for automatically synthesizing high-quality tasks and trajectory datasets for generalist computer-use agents. Leveraging information asymmetry, AgentSynth constructs subtasks that are simple during generation but significantly more challenging when composed into long-horizon tasks, enabling the creation of over 6,000 diverse and realistic tasks. Our pipeline begins with an LLM-based task proposer guided by a persona, followed by an execution agent that completes the task and logs the trajectory. This process is repeated iteratively to form a sequence of subtasks, which are then summarized by a separate agent into a composite task of controllable difficulty. A key strength of AgentSynth is its ability to precisely modulate task complexity by varying the number of subtasks. Empirical evaluations show that state-of-the-art LLM agents suffer a steep performance drop, from 18% success at difficulty level 1 to just 4% at level 6, highlighting the benchmark's difficulty and discriminative power. Moreover, our pipeline achieves a low average cost of \$0.60 per trajectory, orders of magnitude cheaper than human annotations. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/AgentSynth

The increasing complexity and scale of modern telecommunications networks demand intelligent automation to enhance efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. Agentic AI has emerged as a key paradigm for intelligent communications and networking, enabling AI-driven agents to perceive, reason, decide, and act within dynamic networking environments. However, effective decision-making in telecom applications, such as network planning, management, and resource allocation, requires integrating retrieval mechanisms that support multi-hop reasoning, historical cross-referencing, and compliance with evolving 3GPP standards. This article presents a forward-looking perspective on generative information retrieval-inspired intelligent communications and networking, emphasizing the role of knowledge acquisition, processing, and retrieval in agentic AI for telecom systems. We first provide a comprehensive review of generative information retrieval strategies, including traditional retrieval, hybrid retrieval, semantic retrieval, knowledge-based retrieval, and agentic contextual retrieval. We then analyze their advantages, limitations, and suitability for various networking scenarios. Next, we present a survey about their applications in communications and networking. Additionally, we introduce an agentic contextual retrieval framework to enhance telecom-specific planning by integrating multi-source retrieval, structured reasoning, and self-reflective validation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves answer accuracy, explanation consistency, and retrieval efficiency compared to traditional and semantic retrieval methods. Finally, we outline future research directions.

Language agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in web search and information retrieval. However, these search agents assume user queries are complete and unambiguous, an assumption that diverges from reality where users begin with incomplete queries requiring clarification through interaction. Yet most agents lack interactive mechanisms during the search process, and existing benchmarks cannot assess this capability. To address this gap, we introduce InteractComp, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether search agents can recognize query ambiguity and actively interact to resolve it during search. Following the principle of easy to verify, interact to disambiguate, we construct 210 expert-curated questions across 9 domains through a target-distractor methodology that creates genuine ambiguity resolvable only through interaction. Evaluation of 17 models reveals striking failure: the best model achieves only 13.73% accuracy despite 71.50% with complete context, exposing systematic overconfidence rather than reasoning deficits. Forced interaction produces dramatic gains, demonstrating latent capability current strategies fail to engage. Longitudinal analysis shows interaction capabilities stagnated over 15 months while search performance improved seven-fold, revealing a critical blind spot. This stagnation, coupled with the immediate feedback inherent to search tasks, makes InteractComp a valuable resource for both evaluating and training interaction capabilities in search agents. The code is available at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/InteractComp.

Designing a generalist scientific agent capable of performing tasks in laboratory settings to assist researchers has become a key goal in recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Unlike everyday tasks, scientific tasks are inherently more delicate and complex, requiring agents to possess a higher level of reasoning ability, structured and temporal understanding of their environment, and a strong emphasis on safety. Existing approaches often fail to address these multifaceted requirements. To tackle these challenges, we present DAVIS. Unlike traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches, DAVIS incorporates structured and temporal memory, which enables model-based planning. Additionally, DAVIS implements an agentic, multi-turn retrieval system, similar to a human's inner monologue, allowing for a greater degree of reasoning over past experiences. DAVIS demonstrates substantially improved performance on the ScienceWorld benchmark comparing to previous approaches on 8 out of 9 elementary science subjects. In addition, DAVIS's World Model demonstrates competitive performance on the famous HotpotQA and MusiqueQA dataset for multi-hop question answering. To the best of our knowledge, DAVIS is the first RAG agent to employ an interactive retrieval method in a RAG pipeline.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents necessitates the management of extensive, dynamic contexts. Current benchmarks, however, remain largely static, relying on passive retrieval tasks that fail to simulate the complexities of agent-environment interaction, such as non-linear reasoning and iterative feedback. To address this, we introduce AgentLongBench, which evaluates agents through simulated environment rollouts based on Lateral Thinking Puzzles. This framework generates rigorous interaction trajectories across knowledge-intensive and knowledge-free scenarios. Experiments with state-of-the-art models and memory systems (32K to 4M tokens) expose a critical weakness: while adept at static retrieval, agents struggle with the dynamic information synthesis essential for workflows. Our analysis indicates that this degradation is driven by the minimum number of tokens required to resolve a query. This factor explains why the high information density inherent in massive tool responses poses a significantly greater challenge than the memory fragmentation typical of long-turn dialogues.

Search intelligence is evolving from Deep Research to Wide Research, a paradigm essential for retrieving and synthesizing comprehensive information under complex constraints in parallel. However, progress in this field is impeded by the lack of dedicated benchmarks and optimization methodologies for search breadth. To address these challenges, we take a deep dive into Wide Research from two perspectives: Data Pipeline and Agent Optimization. First, we produce WideSeekBench, a General Broad Information Seeking (GBIS) benchmark constructed via a rigorous multi-phase data pipeline to ensure diversity across the target information volume, logical constraints, and domains. Second, we introduce WideSeek, a dynamic hierarchical multi-agent architecture that can autonomously fork parallel sub-agents based on task requirements. Furthermore, we design a unified training framework that linearizes multi-agent trajectories and optimizes the system using end-to-end RL. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of WideSeek and multi-agent RL, highlighting that scaling the number of agents is a promising direction for advancing the Wide Research paradigm.

Small language models are increasingly viewed as a promising, cost-effective approach to agentic AI, with proponents claiming they are sufficiently capable for agentic workflows. However, while smaller agents can closely match larger ones on simple tasks, it remains unclear how their performance scales with task complexity, when large models become necessary, and how to better leverage small agents for long-horizon workloads. In this work, we empirically show that small agents' performance fails to scale with task complexity on deep search and coding tasks, and we introduce Strategy Auctions for Workload Efficiency (SALE), an agent framework inspired by freelancer marketplaces. In SALE, agents bid with short strategic plans, which are scored by a systematic cost-value mechanism and refined via a shared auction memory, enabling per-task routing and continual self-improvement without training a separate router or running all models to completion. Across deep search and coding tasks of varying complexity, SALE reduces reliance on the largest agent by 53%, lowers overall cost by 35%, and consistently improves upon the largest agent's pass@1 with only a negligible overhead beyond executing the final trace. In contrast, established routers that rely on task descriptions either underperform the largest agent or fail to reduce cost -- often both -- underscoring their poor fit for agentic workflows. These results suggest that while small agents may be insufficient for complex workloads, they can be effectively "scaled up" through coordinated task allocation and test-time self-improvement. More broadly, they motivate a systems-level view of agentic AI in which performance gains come less from ever-larger individual models and more from market-inspired coordination mechanisms that organize heterogeneous agents into efficient, adaptive ecosystems.

Robust deployment of large multimodal models (LMMs) in real-world scenarios requires access to external knowledge sources, given the complexity and dynamic nature of real-world information. Existing approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and prompt engineered search agents rely on rigid pipelines, often leading to inefficient or excessive search behaviors. We present MMSearch-R1, the first end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that enables LMMs to perform on-demand, multi-turn search in real-world Internet environments. Our framework integrates both image and text search tools, allowing the model to reason about when and how to invoke them guided by an outcome-based reward with a search penalty. To support training, We collect a multimodal search VQA dataset through a semi-automated pipeline that covers diverse visual and textual knowledge needs and curate a search-balanced subset with both search-required and search-free samples, which proves essential for shaping efficient and on-demand search behavior. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive and info-seeking VQA tasks show that our model not only outperforms RAG-based baselines of the same model size, but also matches the performance of a larger RAG-based model while reducing search calls by over 30%. We further analyze key empirical findings to offer actionable insights for advancing research in multimodal search.

Deep research has revolutionized data analysis, yet data scientists still devote substantial time to manually crafting visualizations, highlighting the need for robust automation from natural language queries. However, current systems struggle with complex datasets containing multiple files and iterative refinement. Existing approaches, including simple single- or multi-agent systems, often oversimplify the task, focusing on initial query parsing while failing to robustly manage data complexity, code errors, or final visualization quality. In this paper, we reframe this challenge as a collaborative multi-agent problem. We introduce CoDA, a multi-agent system that employs specialized LLM agents for metadata analysis, task planning, code generation, and self-reflection. We formalize this pipeline, demonstrating how metadata-focused analysis bypasses token limits and quality-driven refinement ensures robustness. Extensive evaluations show CoDA achieves substantial gains in the overall score, outperforming competitive baselines by up to 41.5%. This work demonstrates that the future of visualization automation lies not in isolated code generation but in integrated, collaborative agentic workflows.

Generating deep research reports requires large-scale information acquisition and the synthesis of insight-driven analysis, posing a significant challenge for current language models. Most existing approaches follow a plan-then-write paradigm, whose performance heavily depends on the quality of the initial outline. However, constructing a comprehensive outline itself demands strong reasoning ability, causing current deep research systems to rely almost exclusively on closed-source or online large models. This reliance raises practical barriers to deployment and introduces safety and privacy concerns for user-authored data. In this work, we present AgentCPM-Report, a lightweight yet high-performing local solution composed of a framework that mirrors the human writing process and an 8B-parameter deep research agent. Our framework uses a Writing As Reasoning Policy (WARP), which enables models to dynamically revise outlines during report generation. Under this policy, the agent alternates between Evidence-Based Drafting and Reasoning-Driven Deepening, jointly supporting information acquisition, knowledge refinement, and iterative outline evolution. To effectively equip small models with this capability, we introduce a Multi-Stage Agentic Training strategy, consisting of cold-start, atomic skill RL, and holistic pipeline RL. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench, DeepConsult, and DeepResearch Gym demonstrate that AgentCPM-Report outperforms leading closed-source systems, with substantial gains in Insight.

In this paper we introduce ResearchCodeAgent, a novel multi-agent system leveraging large language models (LLMs) agents to automate the codification of research methodologies described in machine learning literature. The system bridges the gap between high-level research concepts and their practical implementation, allowing researchers auto-generating code of existing research papers for benchmarking or building on top-of existing methods specified in the literature with availability of partial or complete starter code. ResearchCodeAgent employs a flexible agent architecture with a comprehensive action suite, enabling context-aware interactions with the research environment. The system incorporates a dynamic planning mechanism, utilizing both short and long-term memory to adapt its approach iteratively. We evaluate ResearchCodeAgent on three distinct machine learning tasks with distinct task complexity and representing different parts of the ML pipeline: data augmentation, optimization, and data batching. Our results demonstrate the system's effectiveness and generalizability, with 46.9% of generated code being high-quality and error-free, and 25% showing performance improvements over baseline implementations. Empirical analysis shows an average reduction of 57.9% in coding time compared to manual implementation. We observe higher gains for more complex tasks. ResearchCodeAgent represents a significant step towards automating the research implementation process, potentially accelerating the pace of machine learning research.