2025/11/24 by Shi, Zhengliang, Yiqun Chen, Chen, Yiqun +46
Computer Science · Medicine · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.02038
openalex publication_date 2025/11/24 · openalex created_date 2025/12/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved from text generators into powerful problem solvers. Yet, many open tasks demand critical thinking, multi-source, and verifiable outputs, which are beyond single-shot prompting or standard retrieval-augmented generation. Recently, numerous studies have explored Deep Research (DR), which aims to combine the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with external tools, such as search engines, thereby empowering LLMs to act as research agents capable of completing complex, open-ended tasks. This survey presents a comprehensive and systematic overview of deep research systems, including a clear roadmap, foundational components, practical implementation techniques, important challenges, and future directions. Specifically, our main contributions are as follows: (i) we formalize a three-stage roadmap and distinguish deep research from related paradigms; (ii) we introduce four key components: query planning, information acquisition, memory management, and answer generation, each paired with fine-grained sub-taxonomies; (iii) we summarize optimization techniques, including prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and agentic reinforcement learning; and (iv) we consolidate evaluation criteria and open challenges, aiming to guide and facilitate future development. As the field of deep research continues to evolve rapidly, we are committed to continuously updating this survey to reflect the latest progress in this area.