A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challenges
It provides a foundational overview for researchers and practitioners in AI and information retrieval, but it is incremental as a survey paper.
This survey systematically analyzes LLM-based deep search agents, categorizing existing works by architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation, and identifies open challenges and future directions in the field.
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly revolutionized web search. The emergence of LLM-based Search Agents marks a pivotal shift towards deeper, dynamic, autonomous information seeking. These agents can comprehend user intentions and environmental context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. Leading examples like OpenAI's Deep Research highlight their potential for deep information mining and real-world applications. This survey provides the first systematic analysis of search agents. We comprehensively analyze and categorize existing works from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation, ultimately identifying critical open challenges and outlining promising future research directions in this rapidly evolving field. Our repository is available on https://github.com/YunjiaXi/Awesome-Search-Agent-Papers.