Mingyu Zhang

Weizhi Zhang, Yangning Li, Yuanchen Bei et al. · pku

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.

Chu-Cheng Lin, Daiyi Peng, Yifeng Lu et al.

Reliably composing Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex, multi-step workflows remains a significant challenge. The dominant paradigm -- optimizing discrete prompts in a pipeline -- is notoriously brittle and struggles to enforce the formal compliance required for structured tasks. We introduce Type-Compliant Adaptation Cascades (TACs), a framework that recasts workflow adaptation as learning typed probabilistic programs. TACs treat the entire workflow, which is composed of parameter-efficiently adapted LLMs and deterministic logic, as an unnormalized joint distribution. This enables principled, gradient-based training even with latent intermediate structures. We provide theoretical justification for our tractable optimization objective, proving that the optimization bias vanishes as the model learns type compliance. Empirically, TACs significantly outperform state-of-the-art prompt-optimization baselines. Gains are particularly pronounced on structured tasks, improving FinQA from $12.0\%$ to $24.7\%$ for a Qwen 3 8B model, MGSM-SymPy from $57.1\%$ to $75.9\%$ for a Gemma 2 27B model, MGSM from $1.6\%$ to $27.3\%$, and MuSR from $36.5\%$ to $62.6\%$ for a Gemma 7B model. TACs offer a robust and theoretically grounded paradigm for developing reliable, task-compliant LLM systems.

Cheng Wang, ziru Liu, Pengcheng Tang et al.

Identifying user preferences in dialogue systems is a pivotal aspect of providing satisfying services. Current research shows that using large language models (LLMs) to fine-tune a task-specific preference extractor yields excellent results in terms of accuracy and generalization. However, the primary challenge stems from the inherent difficulty in obtaining high-quality labeled multi-turn dialogue data. Accurately tracking user preference transitions across turns not only demands intensive domain expertise and contextual consistency maintenance for annotators (termed \textbf{``Annotating Disaster''}) but also complicates model training due to error propagation in sequential dependency learning. Inspired by the observation that multi-turn preference extraction can be decomposed into iterative executions of one-turn extraction processes. We propose a novel dialogue data generation framework named \textbf{IterChat}. First, we construct a new data format that categorizes the dialogue data into attributed historical preferences and one-turn dialogues. This reduces the probability of annotation errors and improves annotation efficiency. Then, to generate a high-quality and diverse dialogue dataset, we adopt GPT4 to pre-define the preference slots in the target preference extractor task and then randomly sample the subset of the slots and their corresponding schema values to create the dialogue datasets. Experimental results indicate that fine-tuning or only few-shot prompting with the new dialogue format yields superior performance compared to the original multi-turn dialogues. Additionally, the new data format improves annotator efficiency with a win rate of 28.4\% higher than the original multi-turn dialogues.