about
Deep Researcher with Test-Time Diffusion (arxiv.org)
3 points by omarsar on Jul 23, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of building a report from scratch, this agent writes a rough draft as a changing outline, then repeatedly searches for new information and rewrites weak parts. This search-and-revise cycle produced better long reports on heavy-search, multi-step reasoning tasks than other deep research agents.

Abstract

Deep research agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are rapidly advancing; yet, their performance often plateaus when generating complex, long-form research reports using generic test-time scaling algorithms. Drawing inspiration from the iterative nature of human research, which involves cycles of searching, reasoning, and revision, we propose the Test-Time Diffusion Deep Researcher (TTD-DR). This novel framework conceptualizes research report generation as a diffusion process. TTD-DR initiates this process with a preliminary draft, an updatable skeleton that serves as an evolving foundation to guide the research direction. The draft is then iteratively refined through a "denoising" process, which is dynamically informed by a retrieval mechanism that incorporates external information at each step. The core process is further enhanced by a self-evolutionary algorithm applied to each component of the agentic workflow, ensuring the generation of high-quality context for the diffusion process. This draft-centric design makes the report writing process more timely and coherent while reducing information loss during the iterative search process. We demonstrate that our TTD-DR achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide array of benchmarks that require intensive search and multi-hop reasoning, significantly outperforming existing deep research agents.

Rujun Han, Yanfei Chen, Zoey CuiZhu, Lesly Miculicich, Guan Sun, Yuanjun Bi, Weiming Wen, Hui Wan, Chunfeng Wen, Solène Maître, George Lee, Vishy Tirumalashetty, et al.
arXiv:2507.16075 · cs.CL · submitted Jul 21, 2025
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN