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A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challenges

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arxiv 2508.05668 v3 pith:MRRGW5KU submitted 2025-08-03 cs.IR cs.AIcs.CL

A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challenges

classification cs.IR cs.AIcs.CL
keywords searchagentsdeepchallengesdynamicevaluationinformationllm-based
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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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.

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Cited by 17 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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