Organizations: ITMO University, Kronverksky Pr. 49, bldg. A, St. Petersburg, 197101, Russia · AXXX, 5 Nizhny Susalny Pereulok, bldg. 19, Moscow, 105064, Russia
Deep research systems iteratively plan, gather evidence, synthesize, and revise, making end-to-end latency a key bottleneck for interactive use. Almost all production systems are built on autoregressive (AR) language models and inherit left-to-right decoding in planning and long-form writing. We present DiffResearch, an open multi-agent deep research framework that places a diffusion language model (dLLM) at the core of every stage, and measure how a diffusion backbone changes latency and report quality. Holding the agentic scaffold, retrieval code, prompts, and evaluation fixed, we swap the backbone between an open diffusion model and a comparable AR model. Across 100 Deep Research Bench tasks, the diffusion backbone is roughly 6 times faster end-to-end, driven by order-of-magnitude reductions in planning and writing. We further introduce dFast, a decomposition mode that reads intermediate denoising states and extracts subqueries before generation finishes, providing a 1.99 times median speedup for decomposition in isolation with no loss of report quality. On the benchmark's RACE rubric, dFast obtains the best overall score among the three configurations. Finally, in a public system-level leaderboard snapshot, an instance built on a stronger diffusion model ranks above several commercial systems. We release DiffResearch under an Apache-2.0 license.
Figures & tables
Mode
mean
p50
p90
vs AR
AR
71.45
48.78
111.87
1.0×
dFull
11.89
11.87
16.13
6.0×
dFast
11.97
12.07
16.33
6.0×
Table 1: End-to-end latency (seconds) over the 100 Deep Research Bench tasks. Both diffusion modes are about 6× faster than AR, while dFast provides no additional end-to-end reduction over dFull.
Stage
AR
dFull
dFast
Planner
39.32
3.68
3.64
Decomposer
3.69
0.62
0.36
Retrieval †
3.94
4.83
4.59
Writer ‡
59.78
5.11
5.29
Table 2: Mean per-stage latency (seconds). † Retrieval is a shared Semantic Scholar call, not a model call. ‡ Writer is measured over tasks that reached the writing stage. The model-bound planner and writer stages drive the ∼10 – 12× stage-level speedups.
Extraction point
Mean
P50
P90
P95
First exact-6
268.5
243.4
292.4
338.7
Stable exact-6
475.7
468.4
537.0
581.1
Full generation
499.7
484.9
579.8
629.9
Table 3: Isolated decomposition-latency probe over 100 queries (milliseconds; model loading excluded). Reading the first exact-count JSON from intermediate denoising states is 1.99× faster at the median than full generation; the stable object is 1.04× faster but matches the final answer in 91 of 100 cases.
(a) RACE dimensions
Mode
Overall
Comp.
Insight
Inst.
Read.
dFull
0.3895
0.3577
0.3518
0.4489
0.4328
dFast
0.3969
0.3624
0.3556
0.4610
0.4412
AR
0.3904
0.3413
0.3612
0.4436
0.4438
(b) Language diagnostics over successful reports (means)
Mode/lang
RACE
Chars
Cites
Heads
Table 4: Quality diagnostics. Panel (a): RACE with cleaning and a Gemini 2.5 Pro evaluator. Panel (b): language-specific available-case means; Chars are complete-report non-whitespace characters, Cites are numeric inline citation groups, and Heads are H2–H6 content headings.
System
Overall
Insight
Read.
DiffResearch (Mercury)
48.03
48.20
47.40
OpenAI Deep Research
46.45
43.73
47.22
UESTC-MBSE-RAAA
46.13
48.34
43.78
Dr. Tulu
45.49
44.65
42.30
Claude Research
45.00
42.79
44.66
Kimi Researcher
44.64
41.97
45.59
Table 5: Public Deep Research Bench leaderboard snapshot (RACE, 0–100). The complete Mercury-backed DiffResearch system ranks above several listed commercial systems; this comparison does not isolate diffusion decoding.
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.
Yong Huang, Yulu Huang, for the team Collaboration
We present LongCat-DeepResearch, a deep research system that combines an enhanced LongCat model with a multi-agent workflow for producing comprehensive, evidence-grounded reports. The workflow separates global planning from detailed investigation and coordinates revision at the section level. Multiple planning agents first explore external sources and refine an actionable research plan, termed ResearchSpec. Research agents then investigate and draft their assigned sections in parallel, gathering additional evidence in separate contexts as their analyses develop. Once the sections are assembled, global review guides targeted local revisions, reducing reliance on repeated full-report rewriting. This workflow also supports the construction of research tasks and trajectories for the mid-training and post-training of LongCat's general-purpose models. LongCat-DeepResearch achieves 55.25 on DeepResearchBench, 51.35 on DeepResearchBench II, and 79.83 on ResearchRubrics. On an in-house benchmark, it scores 76.04, ranking second among four compared systems. Development-set analyses show benefits from combining planning perspectives, while further planning refinement has mixed effects. Additional editing improves average automatic readability preference across two benchmarks, with different trends on each.
Diffusion language models (dLLMs) are emerging as an alternative to autoregressive (AR) language models, yet dLLM agents largely inherit an interaction protocol designed for AR generation: once intermediate state is written, later observations can only be incorporated by appending more text. This is a poor match to a defining capability of dLLMs -- reconstructing earlier text conditioned on context that appears both before and after it. We ask whether this capability can support a different agent-state paradigm in which intermediate planning state is directly revisable as evidence arrives. We introduce DiffuPlan, a diffusion search agent that maintains a single editable planning state and reconstructs only the affected steps when later evidence resolves an entity or changes the search route. To support variable-length revisions, we introduce Expansion-Partition Marginalization (EPM), which marginalizes over equivalent expansion paths. We further adapt diffusion trajectory RL to multi-turn search. Across four multi-hop QA benchmarks, DiffuPlan achieves 50.24 average F1, outperforming strong AR search agents. More importantly, under identical data and training, editable planning state improves the diffusion agent by 2.44 F1 versus only 0.47 for its AR source model. These results show that dLLMs need not imitate append-only AR agents: revising committed state is a distinct agentic advantage.
Qisheng Zhou, Zhen Xiong, Qiaoyu Tan
New York University Shanghai · New York University