Caesar: Deep Agentic Web Exploration for Creative Answer Synthesis
Organizations: Cognizant AI Lab · University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
To advance from passive retrieval to creative discovery of new ideas, autonomous agents must be capable of deep, associative synthesis. However, current agentic frameworks prioritize convergent search, often resulting in derivative summaries that lack creativity. Caesar is an agentic architecture designed to bridge the gap between information gathering and synthesis of new insights. Unlike existing agents that treat the web as a flat sequence of disconnected documents, Caesar performs a deep web traversal to construct a dynamic knowledge graph. This graph then serves as a navigational scaffold, guiding the agent to diverse, non-obvious information that flat retrieval would never encounter. Caesar thus consists of two components: (1) exploration driven by a dynamic context-aware policy that maximizes information coverage across the web's topological structure, and (2) synthesis through adversarial refinement that actively seeks novel perspectives rather than confirming established priors. Caesar demonstrates the ability to generate artifacts and answers characterized by high novelty and structural coherence, achieving 13% to 23% improvement over state-of-the-art deep research agents in creative synthesis challenges, with strong dominance across all output formats.
Figures & tables
| Agent | New | Useful | Surp. | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full Answers (Unconstrained) | |||||
| Caesar | 9.11 | 8.87 | 8.98 | 26.96 | – |
| Gemini 3 (Deep) | 8.09 | 7.60 | 8.09 | 23.78 | 0.84 |
| Sonnet 4.5 (Deep) | 6.73 | 7.49 | 6.42 | 20.64 | 1.00 |
| GPT-5.2 (Deep) | 5.07 | 6.31 | 4.36 | 15.74 | 1.00 |
| Gemini 3 (Shallow) | 5.09 | 5.40 | 4.93 | 15.42 | 1.00 |
| Judge | Full | ELI5 | 450w |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini | +1.35 | -0.12 | -0.29 |
| Claude | +0.98 | -0.20 | -0.22 |
| GPT | -0.82 | -0.75 | +0.97 |
| Variant | Total | |
|---|---|---|
| Caesar (Control) | 25.11 | – |
| No KG (Flat Search) | 23.76 | 0.52 |
| Config | New | Usef. | Surp. | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1000 Iter | 8.22 | 8.54 | 8.16 | 24.92 | – |
| 500 Iter | 7.46 | 7.80 | 7.48 | 22.74 | 0.76 |
| 250 Iter | 7.22 | 7.48 | 7.14 | 21.84 | 0.92 |
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Agent | New | Useful | Surp. | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Constrained Synthesis | ||||
| Caesar | 9.11 | 8.89 | 9.11 | 27.11 |
| Gemini 3 (Deep) | 7.78 | 8.33 | 7.67 | 23.78 |
| Gemini 3 (Shallow) | 6.89 | 6.22 | 6.89 | 20.00 |
| Sonnet 4.5 (Shallow) | 6.67 | 6.44 | 6.11 | 19.22 |
| Sonnet 4.5 (Deep) | 5.78 | 6.11 | 5.00 | 16.89 |
| Agent | New | Useful | Surp. | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Constrained Synthesis | ||||
| Caesar | 8.89 | 8.89 | 8.67 | 26.45 |
| Sonnet 4.5 (Deep) | 6.89 | 8.22 | 6.44 | 21.55 |
| Gemini 3 (Shallow) | 6.67 | 5.89 | 6.56 | 19.12 |
| Gemini 3 (Deep) | 4.78 | 6.56 | 5.22 | 16.56 |
| GPT-5.2 (Shallow) | 5.78 | 5.33 | 5.22 | 16.33 |
| Agent | New | Useful | Surp. | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Constrained Synthesis | ||||
| Caesar | 8.78 | 8.78 | 9.00 | 26.56 |
| Gemini 3 (Deep) | 6.56 | 7.33 | 6.67 | 20.56 |
| Sonnet 4.5 (Deep) | 6.00 | 7.78 | 5.33 | 19.11 |
| Sonnet 4.5 (Shallow) | 6.22 | 6.11 | 6.00 | 18.33 |
| GPT-5.2 (Shallow) | 5.78 | 6.11 | 5.00 | 16.89 |
| Config | New | Usef. | Surp. | Total | Effect | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full Answers | ||||||
| 1000 Iter | 8.22 | 8.54 | 8.16 | 24.92 | – | – |
| 500 Iter | 7.46 | 7.80 | 7.48 | 22.74 | 0.76 | Large |
| 250 Iter | 7.22 | 7.48 | 7.14 | 21.84 | 0.92 | Large |
| ELI5 (Unconstrained) | ||||||
| 1000 Iter | 7.56 | 7.98 | 7.46 | 23.00 | – | – |
| Draft | Control | No KG | Effect | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Draft 1 | 24.45 | 23.23 | 0.56 | Large |
| Draft 2 | 24.37 | 23.84 | 0.28 | Small |
| Draft 3 | 24.45 | 23.81 | 0.28 | Small |
| Final Merge | 25.11 | 23.76 | 0.52 | Large |
| Draft | Control | Single-Hop | Effect | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Draft 1 | 24.75 | 23.49 | 0.68 | Large |
| Draft 2 | 24.80 | 23.71 | 0.32 | Small |
| Draft 3 | 24.88 | 23.72 | 0.44 | Medium |
| Final Merge | 25.45 | 23.69 | 0.52 | Large |
| Deep Agent | Avg Score | Effect | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caesar ( , GPT-5- mini ) | 26.16 | – | – |
| Gemini 3 (Deep) | 24.37 | 0.76 | Large |
| Sonnet 4.5 (Deep) | 21.00 | 1.00 | Large |
| GPT-5.2 (Deep) | 16.16 | 1.00 | Large |
| Model | C1 | C2 | C3 | C4 | C5 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caesar | 5 | 18 | 20 | 13 | 7 | 63 |
| Gemini 3 | 18 | 5 | 2 | 9 | 15 | 49 |
| Parameter | Description | Value |
| Phase 1: Deep Web Exploration | ||
| Exploration Budget (Steps) | 1000 | |
| Max Page Content (Char) | 100k | |
| Max Candidate Links per Page | 2000 | |
| Max Allowed Page Revisits | 20 | |
| Max Web Search Actions | 30 | |
Web Agents
Web agents use language and vision models to navigate websites, gather information, and complete tasks through interactive interfaces.
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