AgentDisCo: Towards Disentanglement and Collaboration in Open-ended Deep Research Agents
Jiarui Jin, Zexuan Yan, Shijian Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Yuan Lu
TLDR
AgentDisCo is a novel agentic architecture that disentangles information exploration and exploitation for deep research, achieving self-refinement and strong performance.
Key contributions
- Introduces AgentDisCo, a disentangled and collaborative agentic architecture for deep research.
- Formulates deep research as an adversarial optimization between exploration and exploitation agents.
- Enables self-refinement of design strategies via a meta-optimization harness and policy bank.
- Proposes GALA, a new benchmark for mining latent user research interests from browsing history.
Why it matters
This paper introduces a novel approach to deep research by disentangling exploration and exploitation, leading to more robust and self-refining AI agents. It addresses limitations of current benchmarks and offers a practical, personalized research product.
Original Abstract
In this paper, we present AgentDisCo, a novel Disentangled and Collaborative agentic architecture that formulates deep research as an adversarial optimization problem between information exploration and exploitation. Unlike existing approaches that conflate these two processes into a single module, AgentDisCo employs a critic agent to evaluate generated outlines and refine search queries, and a generator agent to retrieve updated results and revise outlines accordingly. The iteratively refined outline is then passed to a downstream report writer that synthesizes a comprehensive research report. The overall workflow supports both handcrafted and automatically discovered design strategies via a meta-optimization harness, in which the generator agent is repurposed as a scoring agent to evaluate critic outputs and generate quality signals. Powerful code-generation agents (e.g., Claude-Code, Codex) systematically explore agent configurations and construct a policy bank, a structured repository of reusable design strategies, enabling the framework to self-refine without extensive human intervention. We evaluate AgentDisCo on three established deep research benchmarks (DeepResearchBench, DeepConsult, DeepResearchGym) using Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieving performance comparable to or surpassing leading closed-source systems. Observing that existing benchmarks inadequately reflect real-world user needs, we introduce GALA (General AI Life Assistants), a benchmark that mines latent research interests from users' historical browsing behavior. We further develop a rendering agent that converts research reports into visually rich poster presentations, and demonstrate an end-to-end product, AutoResearch Your Interest, which delivers personalized deep research recommendations derived from individual browsing histories.
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