cs.IRFeb 24, 2026

Caesar: Deep Agentic Web Exploration for Creative Answer Synthesis

Authors: Jason Liang, Elliot Meyerson, Risto Miikkulainen

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

Appendix figures & tables11 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Aug 12, 2026

SynWeaver: Website-Prior Task and Trajectory Co-Synthesis for Web Agents

Web agents often struggle to generalize to unseen websites because they lack website-specific supervision. Recent exploration-based data synthesis methods reduce manual annotation, but they still face two key limitations: they often fail to cover the full functionality of a website, and without sufficient website prior knowledge, they tend to propose hallucinated tasks, which in turn limits the diversity and efficiency of downstream trajectory synthesis. We present SynWeaver, a website-prior task-trajectory co-synthesis framework designed to address these challenges. SynWeaver first performs structured website exploration and constructs a website map that covers a broad set of functionally distinct page states and executable interactions on the target website. It then derives page-level and transition-level supervision from this map to train a UI-aware model with website-specific priors, enabling more grounded task proposals. Finally, SynWeaver performs collaborative task-trajectory synthesis, jointly updating the task and execution trajectory when they become inconsistent, and then verifies and repairs the collected results to produce executable, semantically aligned supervision. Experiments on WebArena and WebVoyager demonstrate that SynWeaver consistently outperforms strong synthesis baselines and yields more effective supervision for both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization.
Sep 24, 2026

IterSynth: Rethinking Deep Search Agents via Role-Decoupled Iterative Synthesis

Deep search requires LLM agents to decompose complex queries, search for evidence, and synthesize grounded answers, yet existing ReAct-style agents suffer from two limitations: role coupling, where one policy must handle planning, evidence use, and synthesis; and context accumulation, where growing search histories introduce noise and obscure useful information. To address these issues, we propose IterSynth, a role-decoupled and summary-based paradigm that alternates between a Planner for identifying information needs and a Synthesizer for integrating evidence into an evolving summary state. This design separates planning from synthesis while using the summary as the persistent state of search, reducing both capability coupling and context noise. To train IterSynth effectively, we further introduce Role-Decoupled Policy Optimization (RDPO) for reinforcement learning, which combines terminal outcome rewards with turn-level rubric evaluations and computes role-specific advantages for more precise credit assignment. Experiments on five long-horizon deep-search benchmarks such as BrowseComp and Xbench-DS show that IterSynth-8B achieves an average score of 50.7, surpassing the strongest prior ≤\leq8B agent by +4.2%. Moreover, IterSynth serves as a model-agnostic prompting paradigm, delivering substantial zero-shot gains over ReAct and similar prompting paradigms on frontier proprietary models.
Jun 13, 2026

S1-DeepResearch: Beyond Search, Toward Real-World Long-Horizon Research Agents

Deep research agents aim to solve complex knowledge-intensive tasks through long-horizon planning, evidence gathering, reasoning, and report generation. While recent progress in search agents has demonstrated strong capabilities in information retrieval and answer verification, most existing training datasets remain search-centric, focusing primarily on closed-ended question answering and information localization. As a result, they mainly train information-seeking behavior while providing limited coverage of key deep research capabilities, including evidence integration, knowledge synthesis, planning, file understanding, and structured report generation. In this work, we propose a unified trajectory construction paradigm for deep research agents that combines closed-ended QA and open-ended exploration. The proposed framework consists of graph-grounded task formulation, agentic trajectory rollout, and multi-dimensional trajectory verification, enabling scalable synthesis of high-quality agentic trajectories spanning long-chain complex reasoning, deep research instruction following, report writing, file understanding and generation, and skills usage. Compared with existing search-oriented datasets, our synthesized trajectories place greater emphasis on knowledge synthesis, complex reasoning, and planning. S1-DeepResearch-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable scale across 20 benchmarks spanning five capability dimensions, including complex reasoning, instruction following, report generation, file understanding, and skills usage. On several challenging deep research benchmarks, it approaches the performance of leading proprietary frontier models. These results highlight the importance of jointly modeling information acquisition, knowledge synthesis, and planning-oriented agent behaviors for building effective deep research agents.