cs.IRApr 3, 2026

Self-Optimizing Multi-Agent Systems for Deep Research

Authors: Arthur Câmara, Vincent Slot, Jakub Zavrel

Organizations: Zeta Alpha, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract

Given a user's complex information need, a multi-agent Deep Research system iteratively plans, retrieves, and synthesizes evidence across hundreds of documents to produce a high-quality answer. In one possible architecture, an orchestrator agent coordinates the process, while parallel worker agents execute tasks. Current Deep Research systems, however, often rely on hand-engineered prompts and static architectures, making improvement brittle, expensive, and time-consuming. We therefore explore various multi-agent optimization methods to show that enabling agents to self-play and explore different prompt combinations can produce high-quality Deep Research systems that match or outperform expert-crafted prompts.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables1 asset

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Jul 30, 2026

DeepResearch Agent System

The DeepResearch Agent System is a large language model system engineered for deep information retrieval, multi-step reasoning, and autonomous research tasks. Built upon a sparse activation architecture with 30 billion total parameters of which only 3 billion are activated per token, the system achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple agent search benchmarks while delivering 3.2 times faster inference compared to dense counterparts of equivalent scale. The system supports a 128K-token context window with hierarchical attention mechanisms that yield 18.7% accuracy and 23.4% recall improvements over standard long-context approaches. A dual-mode reasoning engine provides both a ReAct paradigm for basic multi-step problem solving and an IterResearch mode for high-performance iterative research with up to 20 reasoning steps, collectively delivering a 31.2% accuracy improvement over single-pass baselines. Multi-tool coordination integrates retrieval, computation, web search, and file parsing modules to achieve 92.1% tool-use accuracy. A reinforcement learning optimization framework based on the GRPO algorithm provides token-level policy gradients that improve training stability by 35% and accelerate convergence by 42%. An automated data synthesis pipeline with seed-based expansion achieves a 92.5% usability rate. Benchmark results include 87.3% on Humanity's Last Exam, 85.3% on BrowserComp Chinese, and 91.2% on WebWalkerQA. The system is fully open-sourced, including data synthesis, training, and inference code, and supports applications in academic research, business analysis, R&D support, and education.
Jun 5, 2026

DuMate-DeepResearch: An Auditable Multi-Agent System with Recursive Search and Rubric-Grounded Reasoning

Deep Research (DR) has emerged as a new agentic paradigm to tackle complex, open-ended research tasks, demanding systems that can iteratively frame problems, acquire evidence, verify sources, and synthesize long-form reports. In practice, however, current DR systems are constrained by four interrelated limitations: long-horizon planning over an underspecified scope, the bottleneck of decomposing and scheduling such tasks within a single agent, hallucination risk in long-form synthesis, and limited process auditability. This technical report presents DuMate-DeepResearch, a multi-agent DR framework built on the Qianfan Agent Foundry. The framework decouples the Agent Core, which handles task understanding, planning, and scheduling, from an extensible Tool Ecosystem for retrieval, evidence acquisition, and report rendering, making every intermediate decision and tool invocation explicitly traceable. Building on this infrastructure, DuMate-DeepResearch further introduces three mechanisms: (i) a graph-based dynamic planning strategy expands the research roadmap coarse-to-fine and continuously revises it through reflection, re-planning, backtracking, and parallel branching; (ii) a recursive two-level execution design delegates each complex search sub-task to an inner Search Agent that runs its own planning loop, isolating noisy retrieval and stabilizing long-horizon execution; (iii) a rubric-based test-time optimization mechanism dynamically generates task-specific quality criteria and uses them as live reasoning scaffolds for evidence-grounded synthesis and adaptive stopping. Across two deep research benchmarks, DuMate-DeepResearch establishes new state-of-the-art results: the best overall score (58.03%) on DeepResearch Bench, and the best overall score (61.95%) on DeepResearch Bench II while ranking first in information recall and analysis.
May 15, 2026

Argus: Evidence Assembly for Scalable Deep Research Agents

Deep research agents have achieved remarkable progress on complex information seeking tasks. Even long ReAct style rollouts explore only a single trajectory, while recent state of the art systems scale inference time compute via parallel search and aggregation. Yet deep research answers are composed of complementary pieces of evidence, which parallel rollouts often duplicate rather than complete, yielding diminishing returns while pushing the aggregation context toward the model's limit. We propose Argus, an agentic system in which a Searcher and a Navigator cooperate to treat deep research as assembling a jigsaw from complementary evidence pieces, rather than brute forcing the whole answer in parallel. The Searcher collects evidence traces for a given sub-query through ReAct-style interaction. The Navigator maintains a shared evidence graph, verifying which pieces are still missing, dispatching Searchers to gather them, and reasoning over the completed graph to produce a source-traced final answer. We train the Navigator with reinforcement learning to verify, dispatch, and synthesize, while independently training the Searcher to remain a standard ReAct agent. The resulting Navigator supports rollouts with a single Searcher or many in parallel without retraining. With both Searcher and Navigator built on a 35B-A3B MoE backbone, Argus gains 5.5 points with a single Searcher and 12.7 points with 8 parallel Searchers, averaged over eight benchmarks. With 64 Searchers it reaches 86.2 on BrowseComp, surpassing every proprietary agent we benchmark, while the Navigator's reasoning context stays under 21.5K tokens.