Daily Papers

We introduce LongDA, a data analysis benchmark for evaluating LLM-based agents under documentation-intensive analytical workflows. In contrast to existing benchmarks that assume well-specified schemas and inputs, LongDA targets real-world settings in which navigating long documentation and complex data is the primary bottleneck. To this end, we manually curate raw data files, long and heterogeneous documentation, and expert-written publications from 17 publicly available U.S. national surveys, from which we extract 505 analytical queries grounded in real analytical practice. Solving these queries requires agents to first retrieve and integrate key information from multiple unstructured documents, before performing multi-step computations and writing executable code, which remains challenging for existing data analysis agents. To support the systematic evaluation under this setting, we develop LongTA, a tool-augmented agent framework that enables document access, retrieval, and code execution, and evaluate a range of proprietary and open-source models. Our experiments reveal substantial performance gaps even among state-of-the-art models, highlighting the challenges researchers should consider before applying LLM agents for decision support in real-world, high-stakes analytical settings.

Critical peer review of scientific manuscripts presents a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), partly due to data limitations and the complexity of expert reasoning. This report introduces Persistent Workflow Prompting (PWP), a potentially broadly applicable prompt engineering methodology designed to bridge this gap using standard LLM chat interfaces (zero-code, no APIs). We present a proof-of-concept PWP prompt for the critical analysis of experimental chemistry manuscripts, featuring a hierarchical, modular architecture (structured via Markdown) that defines detailed analysis workflows. We develop this PWP prompt through iterative application of meta-prompting techniques and meta-reasoning aimed at systematically codifying expert review workflows, including tacit knowledge. Submitted once at the start of a session, this PWP prompt equips the LLM with persistent workflows triggered by subsequent queries, guiding modern reasoning LLMs through systematic, multimodal evaluations. Demonstrations show the PWP-guided LLM identifying major methodological flaws in a test case while mitigating LLM input bias and performing complex tasks, including distinguishing claims from evidence, integrating text/photo/figure analysis to infer parameters, executing quantitative feasibility checks, comparing estimates against claims, and assessing a priori plausibility. To ensure transparency and facilitate replication, we provide full prompts, detailed demonstration analyses, and logs of interactive chats as supplementary resources. Beyond the specific application, this work offers insights into the meta-development process itself, highlighting the potential of PWP, informed by detailed workflow formalization, to enable sophisticated analysis using readily available LLMs for complex scientific tasks.

Tool-augmented large language models have advanced from single-turn question answering to deep research workflows that iteratively plan queries, invoke external tools, and synthesize information to address complex information needs. Evaluating such workflows presents a fundamental challenge: reliance on live APIs introduces non-determinism, as tool invocations may yield different results across runs due to temporal drift, rate limiting, and evolving backend states. This variance undermines reproducibility and invalidates cross-system comparisons. We present ScholarGym, a simulation environment for reproducible evaluation of deep research workflows on academic literature. The environment decouples workflow components into query planning, tool invocation, and relevance assessment, enabling fine-grained analysis of each stage under controlled conditions. Built on a static corpus of 570K papers with deterministic retrieval, ScholarGym provides 2,536 queries with expert-annotated ground truth. Experiments across diverse backbone models reveal how reasoning capabilities, planning strategies, and selection mechanisms interact over iterative refinement.

This paper introduces Opus, a novel framework for generating and optimizing Workflows tailored to complex Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) use cases, focusing on cost reduction and quality enhancement while adhering to established industry processes and operational constraints. Our approach generates executable Workflows from Intention, defined as the alignment of Client Input, Client Output, and Process Context. These Workflows are represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), with nodes as Tasks consisting of sequences of executable Instructions, including tools and human expert reviews. We adopt a two-phase methodology: Workflow Generation and Workflow Optimization. In the Generation phase, Workflows are generated using a Large Work Model (LWM) informed by a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) that encodes domain-specific procedural and operational knowledge. In the Optimization phase, Workflows are transformed into Workflow Graphs (WFGs), where optimal Workflows are determined through path optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges in reliably retrieving detailed process data as well as generating industry-compliant workflows. The key contributions of this paper include: - The integration of a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) into a Large Work Model (LWM), enabling the generation of context-aware, semantically aligned, structured and auditable Workflows. - A two-phase approach that combines Workflow Generation from Intention with graph-based Workflow Optimization. - Opus Alpha 1 Large and Opus Alpha 1 Small, models that outperform state-of-the-art LLMs by 38\% and 29\% respectively in Workflow Generation for a Medical Coding use case.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven a revolutionary paradigm shift in process automation from Robotic Process Automation to Agentic Process Automation by automating the workflow orchestration procedure based on LLMs. However, existing LLMs (even the advanced OpenAI GPT-4o) are confined to achieving satisfactory capability in workflow orchestration. To address this limitation, we present WorkflowLLM, a data-centric framework elaborately designed to enhance the capability of LLMs in workflow orchestration. It first constructs a large-scale fine-tuning dataset WorkflowBench with 106,763 samples, covering 1,503 APIs from 83 applications across 28 categories. Specifically, the construction process can be divided into three phases: (1) Data Collection: we collect real-world workflow data from Apple Shortcuts and RoutineHub, transcribing them into Python-style code. We further equip them with generated hierarchical thought via ChatGPT. (2) Query Expansion: we prompt ChatGPT to generate more task queries to enrich the diversity and complexity of workflows. (3) Workflow Generation: we leverage an annotator model trained on collected data to generate workflows for synthesized queries. Finally, we merge the synthetic samples that pass quality confirmation with the collected samples to obtain the WorkflowBench. Based on WorkflowBench, we fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B to obtain WorkflowLlama. Our experiments show that WorkflowLlama demonstrates a strong capacity to orchestrate complex workflows, while also achieving notable generalization performance on previously unseen APIs. Additionally, WorkflowBench exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities on an out-of-distribution task planning dataset, T-Eval. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/WorkflowLLM.

Automatic research with Large Language Models (LLMs) is rapidly gaining importance, driving the development of increasingly complex workflows involving multi-agent systems, planning, tool usage, code execution, and human-agent interaction to accelerate research processes. However, as more researchers and developers begin to use and build upon these tools and platforms, the complexity and difficulty of extending and maintaining such agentic workflows have become a significant challenge, particularly as algorithms and architectures continue to advance. To address this growing complexity, TinyScientist identifies the essential components of the automatic research workflow and proposes an interactive, extensible, and controllable framework that easily adapts to new tools and supports iterative growth. We provide an open-source codebase, an interactive web demonstration, and a PyPI Python package to make state-of-the-art auto-research pipelines broadly accessible to every researcher and developer.

Analyzing unstructured data, such as complex documents, has been a persistent challenge in data processing. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in this regard, leading to recent proposals for declarative frameworks for LLM-powered unstructured data processing. However, these frameworks focus on reducing cost when executing user-specified operations using LLMs, rather than improving accuracy, executing most operations as-is. This is problematic for complex tasks and data, where LLM outputs for user-defined operations are often inaccurate, even with optimized prompts. We present DocETL, a system that optimizes complex document processing pipelines, while accounting for LLM shortcomings. DocETL offers a declarative interface for users to define such pipelines and uses an agent-based framework to automatically optimize them, leveraging novel agent-based rewrites (that we call {\em rewrite directives}) and an optimization and evaluation framework that we introduce. We introduce {\em (i)} logical rewriting of pipelines, tailored for LLM-based tasks, {\em (ii)} an agent-guided plan evaluation mechanism that synthesizes and orchestrates task-specific validation prompts, and {\em (iii)} an optimization algorithm that efficiently finds promising plans, considering the time constraints of LLM-based plan generation and evaluation. Our evaluation on three different unstructured document analysis tasks demonstrates that DocETL finds plans with outputs that are 1.34 to 4.6times higher quality (e.g., more accurate, comprehensive) than well-engineered baselines, addressing a critical gap in existing declarative frameworks for unstructured data analysis. DocETL is open-source at docetl.org, and as of October 2024, has amassed over 800 GitHub Stars, with users spanning a variety of domains.

Large language model (LLM)-based systems are becoming increasingly popular for solving tasks by constructing executable workflows that interleave LLM calls, information retrieval, tool use, code execution, memory updates, and verification. This survey reviews recent methods for designing and optimizing such workflows, which we treat as agentic computation graphs (ACGs). We organize the literature based on when workflow structure is determined, where structure refers to which components or agents are present, how they depend on each other, and how information flows between them. This lens distinguishes static methods, which fix a reusable workflow scaffold before deployment, from dynamic methods, which select, generate, or revise the workflow for a particular run before or during execution. We further organize prior work along three dimensions: when structure is determined, what part of the workflow is optimized, and which evaluation signals guide optimization (e.g., task metrics, verifier signals, preferences, or trace-derived feedback). We also distinguish reusable workflow templates, run-specific realized graphs, and execution traces, separating reusable design choices from the structures actually deployed in a given run and from realized runtime behavior. Finally, we outline a structure-aware evaluation perspective that complements downstream task metrics with graph-level properties, execution cost, robustness, and structural variation across inputs. Our goal is to provide a clear vocabulary, a unified framework for positioning new methods, a more comparable view of existing body of literature, and a more reproducible evaluation standard for future work in workflow optimizations for LLM agents.

We introduce a finance & accounting benchmark (Finch) for evaluating AI agents on real-world, enterprise-grade professional workflows -- interleaving data entry, structuring, formatting, web search, cross-file retrieval, calculation, modeling, validation, translation, visualization, and reporting. Finch is sourced from authentic enterprise workspaces at Enron (15,000 spreadsheets and 500,000 emails from 150 employees) and other financial institutions, preserving in-the-wild messiness across multimodal artifacts (text, tables, formulas, charts, code, and images) and spanning diverse domains such as budgeting, trading, and asset management. We propose a workflow construction process that combines LLM-assisted discovery with expert annotation: (1) LLM-assisted, expert-verified derivation of workflows from real-world email threads and version histories of spreadsheet files, and (2) meticulous expert annotation for workflows, requiring over 700 hours of domain-expert effort. This yields 172 composite workflows with 384 tasks, involving 1,710 spreadsheets with 27 million cells, along with PDFs and other artifacts, capturing the intrinsically messy, long-horizon, knowledge-intensive, and collaborative nature of real-world enterprise work. We conduct both human and automated evaluations of frontier AI systems including GPT 5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4, and Qwen 3 Max, and GPT 5.1 Pro spends 16.8 minutes per workflow yet passes only 38.4% of workflows, while Claude Sonnet 4.5 passes just 25.0%. Comprehensive case studies further surface the challenges that real-world enterprise workflows pose for AI agents.

The current workflow for Information Extraction (IE) analysts involves the definition of the entities/relations of interest and a training corpus with annotated examples. In this demonstration we introduce a new workflow where the analyst directly verbalizes the entities/relations, which are then used by a Textual Entailment model to perform zero-shot IE. We present the design and implementation of a toolkit with a user interface, as well as experiments on four IE tasks that show that the system achieves very good performance at zero-shot learning using only 5--15 minutes per type of a user's effort. Our demonstration system is open-sourced at https://github.com/BBN-E/ZS4IE . A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/676138340 .

As autonomous agents rapidly evolve, their ability to reliably manipulate ubiquitous digital documents has become critical for enabling general-purpose AI assistants and automating complex workspace workflows. In this paper, we introduce DocOps, a deterministically verifiable evaluation framework underpinned by a hierarchical taxonomy that deconstructs document operations inspired by real-world practices into atomic dimensions and escalating workflow complexities. Based on DocOps, we systematically evaluate representative closed- and open-source models across various agentic harnesses, revealing that even the most advanced frontier configurations still exhibit profound limitations when handling highly coupled, long-range tasks. Furthermore, a fine-grained analysis of existing agents' manipulation behaviors uncovers 3 key failure modes: long-term state tracking collapse, shallow semantic verification, and destructive editing of structural metadata. Ultimately, our work exposes the capability boundaries of agents in maintaining global document consistency, shedding light on the future design of robust, non-destructive agents for complex digital ecosystems.

Workflows are a fundamental component of automation in enterprise platforms, enabling the orchestration of tasks, data processing, and system integrations. Despite being widely used, building workflows can be complex, often requiring manual configuration through low-code platforms or visual programming tools. To simplify this process, we explore the use of generative foundation models, particularly vision-language models (VLMs), to automatically generate structured workflows from visual inputs. Translating hand-drawn sketches or computer-generated diagrams into executable workflows is challenging due to the ambiguity of free-form drawings, variations in diagram styles, and the difficulty of inferring execution logic from visual elements. To address this, we introduce StarFlow, a framework for generating structured workflow outputs from sketches using vision-language models. We curate a diverse dataset of workflow diagrams -- including synthetic, manually annotated, and real-world samples -- to enable robust training and evaluation. We finetune and benchmark multiple vision-language models, conducting a series of ablation studies to analyze the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our results show that finetuning significantly enhances structured workflow generation, outperforming large vision-language models on this task.

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows, extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.

Open-source scientific software is a major driver of scientific progress, yet its development and reuse remain difficult in collaborative settings. Researchers repeatedly face four recurring challenges: discovering and reproducing existing routines, adapting them for new use cases, sharing and scaling them across collaborators, and stabilizing them with reproducible execution environments. We present Album, an open-source framework for packaging and sharing scientific routines as executable artifacts through two minimal primitives: (i) the solution, a Python-native executable entry point that combines machine-readable metadata, arguments, environment specifications, and lifecycle hooks; and (ii) the catalog, a decentralized, git-native distribution mechanism with indexed search and optional web rendering for discovery, provenance, and governance. Album uses a two-context execution model in which a host controller evaluates manifests and prepares per-solution environments, while lifecycle hooks execute inside isolated solution environments. This design supports reproducible execution, post-environment setup, and the composition of routines with incompatible dependencies. Album can be used in conjunction with LLM agents: solutions can be drafted and revised with LLM assistance, and a MCP interface exposes cataloged solutions as callable tools for tool-grounded discovery and orchestration. We evaluate Album through four realworld imaging deployments spanning interactive visualization of electron microscopy data, integration of multiple segmentation methods, the orchestration of cryo-electron tomography competition workflows, and mineral quantification pipelines. Overall, Album complements package managers, workflow systems, and container runtimes by making scientific routines executable, shareable artifacts. Documentation and examples are available at https://album.solutions.

Retrieving procedure-oriented evidence from materials science papers is difficult because key synthesis details are often scattered across long, context-heavy documents and are not well captured by paragraph-only dense retrieval. We present RECIPER, a dual-view retrieval pipeline that indexes both paragraph-level context and compact large language model-extracted procedural summaries, then combines the two candidate streams with lightweight lexical reranking. Across four dense retrieval backbones, RECIPER consistently improves early-rank retrieval over paragraph-only dense retrieval, achieving average gains of +3.73 in Recall@1, +2.85 in nDCG@10, and +3.13 in MRR. With BGE-large-en-v1.5, it reaches 86.82%, 97.07%, and 97.85% on Recall@1, Recall@5, and Recall@10, respectively. We further observe improved downstream question answering under automatic metrics, suggesting that procedural summaries can serve as a useful complementary retrieval signal for procedure-oriented materials question answering. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ReaganWu/RECIPER.

Automating enterprise workflows could unlock $4 trillion/year in productivity gains. Despite being of interest to the data management community for decades, the ultimate vision of end-to-end workflow automation has remained elusive. Current solutions rely on process mining and robotic process automation (RPA), in which a bot is hard-coded to follow a set of predefined rules for completing a workflow. Through case studies of a hospital and large B2B enterprise, we find that the adoption of RPA has been inhibited by high set-up costs (12-18 months), unreliable execution (60% initial accuracy), and burdensome maintenance (requiring multiple FTEs). Multimodal foundation models (FMs) such as GPT-4 offer a promising new approach for end-to-end workflow automation given their generalized reasoning and planning abilities. To study these capabilities we propose ECLAIR, a system to automate enterprise workflows with minimal human supervision. We conduct initial experiments showing that multimodal FMs can address the limitations of traditional RPA with (1) near-human-level understanding of workflows (93% accuracy on a workflow understanding task) and (2) instant set-up with minimal technical barrier (based solely on a natural language description of a workflow, ECLAIR achieves end-to-end completion rates of 40%). We identify human-AI collaboration, validation, and self-improvement as open challenges, and suggest ways they can be solved with data management techniques. Code is available at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/eclair-agents

AI scientist systems, capable of autonomously executing the full research workflow from hypothesis generation and experimentation to paper writing, hold significant potential for accelerating scientific discovery. However, the internal workflow of these systems have not been closely examined. This lack of scrutiny poses a risk of introducing flaws that could undermine the integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness of their research outputs. In this paper, we identify four potential failure modes in contemporary AI scientist systems: inappropriate benchmark selection, data leakage, metric misuse, and post-hoc selection bias. To examine these risks, we design controlled experiments that isolate each failure mode while addressing challenges unique to evaluating AI scientist systems. Our assessment of two prominent open-source AI scientist systems reveals the presence of several failures, across a spectrum of severity, which can be easily overlooked in practice. Finally, we demonstrate that access to trace logs and code from the full automated workflow enables far more effective detection of such failures than examining the final paper alone. We thus recommend journals and conferences evaluating AI-generated research to mandate submission of these artifacts alongside the paper to ensure transparency, accountability, and reproducibility.

Academic output is produced across a fragmented toolchain: literature discovery in one application, reference management in another, writing in a LaTeX editor, formatting against venue templates by hand, and submission through yet another portal. Each boundary between tools forces a context switch, a format conversion, or a manual copy-paste step, and the cumulative cost dominates the time researchers spend on activities that are not research. We present Bibby AI, an editor-native platform that collapses this toolchain into a single Research-Write-Publish pipeline built around a cloud LaTeX editor. Unlike assistants that attach to an existing editor through a browser extension, Bibby AI owns the full document state, compilation pipeline, and revision history, which allows its agents to perform retrieval-grounded citation insertion, structural edits, and template-compliant reformatting as first-class, verifiable operations rather than text suggestions. The platform integrates (i) ingestion pipelines that convert PDF, DOCX, and handwritten mathematics into clean LaTeX; (ii) a retrieval layer over scholarly metadata enriched with patent-to-paper citation signals derived from USPTO PatentsView and the Marx-Fuegi citation corpus, surfacing the translational impact of candidate references; and (iii) task-scoped agents for literature triage, drafting, revision, and venue formatting that operate directly on the document's abstract syntax representation. Bibby AI is deployed in production and serves more than 5,000 active researchers across more than 50 subscribing universities. We describe the architecture, the design decisions that editor-nativeness makes possible, and the workflow-level time-savings framework we use to evaluate the platform against fragmented baselines.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their integration into autonomous agent systems has created unprecedented opportunities for document analysis, decision support, and knowledge retrieval. However, the complexity of developing, evaluating, and iterating on LLM-based agent workflows presents significant barriers to researchers, particularly those without extensive software engineering expertise. We present FROAV (Framework for RAG Observation and Agent Verification), an open-source research platform that democratizes LLM agent research by providing a plug-and-play architecture combining visual workflow orchestration, a comprehensive evaluation framework, and extensible Python integration. FROAV implements a multi-stage Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline coupled with a rigorous "LLM-as-a-Judge" evaluation system, all accessible through intuitive graphical interfaces. Our framework integrates n8n for no-code workflow design, PostgreSQL for granular data management, FastAPI for flexible backend logic, and Streamlit for human-in-the-loop interaction. Through this integrated ecosystem, researchers can rapidly prototype RAG strategies, conduct prompt engineering experiments, validate agent performance against human judgments, and collect structured feedback-all without writing infrastructure code. We demonstrate the framework's utility through its application to financial document analysis, while emphasizing its material-agnostic architecture that adapts to any domain requiring semantic analysis. FROAV represents a significant step toward making LLM agent research accessible to a broader scientific community, enabling researchers to focus on hypothesis testing and algorithmic innovation rather than system integration challenges.

Open data repositories hold potential for evidence-based decision-making, yet are inaccessible to non-experts lacking expertise in dataset discovery, schema mapping, and statistical analysis. Large language models show promise for individual tasks, but end-to-end analytical workflows expose fundamental limitations: attention dilutes across growing contexts, specialized reasoning patterns interfere, and errors propagate undetected. We present PublicAgent, a multi-agent framework that addresses these limitations through decomposition into specialized agents for intent clarification, dataset discovery, analysis, and reporting. This architecture maintains focused attention within agent contexts and enables validation at each stage. Evaluation across five models and 50 queries derives five design principles for multi-agent LLM systems. First, specialization provides value independent of model strength--even the strongest model shows 97.5% agent win rates, with benefits orthogonal to model scale. Second, agents divide into universal (discovery, analysis) and conditional (report, intent) categories. Universal agents show consistent effectiveness (std dev 12.4%) while conditional agents vary by model (std dev 20.5%). Third, agents mitigate distinct failure modes--removing discovery or analysis causes catastrophic failures (243-280 instances), while removing report or intent causes quality degradation. Fourth, architectural benefits persist across task complexity with stable win rates (86-92% analysis, 84-94% discovery), indicating workflow management value rather than reasoning enhancement. Fifth, wide variance in agent effectiveness across models (42-96% for analysis) requires model-aware architecture design. These principles guide when and why specialization is necessary for complex analytical workflows while enabling broader access to public data through natural language interfaces.

Intelligent document processing pipelines extract structured entities (tables, images, and text) from documents for use in downstream systems such as knowledge bases, retrieval-augmented generation, and analytics. A persistent limitation of existing pipelines is that extraction output is produced without any intrinsic mechanism to verify whether it faithfully represents the source. Model-internal confidence scores measure inference certainty, not correspondence to the document, and extraction errors pass silently into downstream consumers. We present Reconstruction as Validation (RaV-IDP), a document processing pipeline that introduces reconstruction as a first-class architectural component. After each entity is extracted, a dedicated reconstructor renders the extracted representation back into a form comparable to the original document region, and a comparator scores fidelity between the reconstruction and the unmodified source crop. This fidelity score is a grounded, label-free quality signal. When fidelity falls below a per-entity-type threshold, a structured GPT-4.1 vision fallback is triggered and the validation loop repeats. We enforce a bootstrap constraint: the comparator always anchors against the original document region, never against the extraction, preventing the validation from becoming circular. We further propose a per-stage evaluation framework pairing each pipeline component with an appropriate benchmark. The code pipeline is publicly available at https://github.com/pritesh-2711/RaV-IDP for experimentation and use.

Scientific literature search often requires more than retrieving papers from a single query: users' intents are underspecified, preference-dependent, and evolve through interaction. Existing search agents typically rely on fixed pipelines or implicit language-only reasoning, making their search strategies difficult to control, inspect, and refine. We introduce PaperPilot, a multi-turn literature search agent that frames scientific search as workflow induction. Given an anchor paper and a user query, PaperPilot constructs an executable DAG of paper-search operators, including keyword search, citation expansion, filtering, scoring, reranking, and evidence extraction. User feedback is then used to refine both the query and the workflow itself. We train PaperPilot with supervised workflow imitation and preference optimization over controlled workflow corruptions. Experiments show that PaperPilot-9B improves over the base Qwen3.5-9B toolset agent under multi-turn interaction, increasing Hit@5 from 58.0 to 77.0, MRR from 47.5 to 59.4, and nDCG@10 from 26.8 to 32.5, while reducing workflow execution errors from 9.5% to 0%. These results show that explicit, editable search workflows provide an effective and controllable interface for aligning literature search agents with complex scientific intent.

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf. We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools. PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI). Early aggregated analytics demonstrate active user engagement and validate the practicality of an editor-native, agentic writing assistant. More details about this demo and video could be found at https://github.com/PaperDebugger/PaperDebugger.

Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by generating SQL queries, Python code, and GUI operations. This automation can improve the productivity of experts while democratizing access to large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we introduce Spider2-V, the first multimodal agent benchmark focusing on professional data science and engineering workflows, featuring 494 real-world tasks in authentic computer environments and incorporating 20 enterprise-level professional applications. These tasks, derived from real-world use cases, evaluate the ability of a multimodal agent to perform data-related tasks by writing code and managing the GUI in enterprise data software systems. To balance realistic simulation with evaluation simplicity, we devote significant effort to developing automatic configurations for task setup and carefully crafting evaluation metrics for each task. Furthermore, we supplement multimodal agents with comprehensive documents of these enterprise data software systems. Our empirical evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents do not reliably automate full data workflows (14.0% success). Even with step-by-step guidance, these agents still underperform in tasks that require fine-grained, knowledge-intensive GUI actions (16.2%) and involve remote cloud-hosted workspaces (10.6%). We hope that Spider2-V paves the way for autonomous multimodal agents to transform the automation of data science and engineering workflow. Our code and data are available at https://spider2-v.github.io.

Institutional documents contain substantial amounts of operational and analytical information embedded within figures and tables. Current approaches for extracting visual content from documents are largely built around generic document layout analysis, where figures and tables are treated as uniformly relevant document objects rather than semantically meaningful analytical artifacts. In this work, we introduce a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework for data snapshot extraction, the task of identifying and localizing semantically meaningful visual artifacts within institutional documents. The benchmark spans humanitarian reports, World Bank policy research working papers, and project appraisal documents, and includes annotations for figures and tables that contain reusable analytical information. Using this dataset, we benchmarked multiple open-source layout detection models and evaluated both detection performance and spatial extraction quality. Our results show that current models struggle to generalize to operational institutional documents despite strong performance on conventional academic benchmarks. Common failure modes include confusion between analytical and non-analytical content, fragmentation of composite analytical artifacts, and incomplete extraction of contextual information required for interpretation. These findings highlight a persistent gap between generic document layout analysis and operationally useful data snapshot extraction. We release the source PDFs, annotation dataset, metadata, and source code to support future research in operational document intelligence. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ai4data/data-snapshot and the source code is available at https://github.com/worldbank/ai4data/tree/main/experimental/data-snapshot.

Identifying subtle technical errors within complex scientific and technical documents, especially those requiring multimodal interpretation (e.g., formulas in images), presents a significant hurdle for Large Language Models (LLMs) whose inherent error-correction tendencies can mask inaccuracies. This exploratory proof-of-concept (PoC) study investigates structured LLM context conditioning, informed by Persistent Workflow Prompting (PWP) principles, as a methodological strategy to modulate this LLM behavior at inference time. The approach is designed to enhance the reliability of readily available, general-purpose LLMs (specifically Gemini 2.5 Pro and ChatGPT Plus o3) for precise validation tasks, crucially relying only on their standard chat interfaces without API access or model modifications. To explore this methodology, we focused on validating chemical formulas within a single, complex test paper with known textual and image-based errors. Several prompting strategies were evaluated: while basic prompts proved unreliable, an approach adapting PWP structures to rigorously condition the LLM's analytical mindset appeared to improve textual error identification with both models. Notably, this method also guided Gemini 2.5 Pro to repeatedly identify a subtle image-based formula error previously overlooked during manual review, a task where ChatGPT Plus o3 failed in our tests. These preliminary findings highlight specific LLM operational modes that impede detail-oriented validation and suggest that PWP-informed context conditioning offers a promising and highly accessible technique for developing more robust LLM-driven analytical workflows, particularly for tasks requiring meticulous error detection in scientific and technical documents. Extensive validation beyond this limited PoC is necessary to ascertain broader applicability.

Understanding visually-rich business documents to extract structured data and automate business workflows has been receiving attention both in academia and industry. Although recent multi-modal language models have achieved impressive results, we find that existing benchmarks do not reflect the complexity of real documents seen in industry. In this work, we identify the desiderata for a more comprehensive benchmark and propose one we call Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU). VRDU contains two datasets that represent several challenges: rich schema including diverse data types as well as hierarchical entities, complex templates including tables and multi-column layouts, and diversity of different layouts (templates) within a single document type. We design few-shot and conventional experiment settings along with a carefully designed matching algorithm to evaluate extraction results. We report the performance of strong baselines and offer three observations: (1) generalizing to new document templates is still very challenging, (2) few-shot performance has a lot of headroom, and (3) models struggle with hierarchical fields such as line-items in an invoice. We plan to open source the benchmark and the evaluation toolkit. We hope this helps the community make progress on these challenging tasks in extracting structured data from visually rich documents.

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to improve organizational activities and their outcomes by managing the underlying processes. To achieve this, it is often necessary to consider information from various sources, including unstructured textual documents. Therefore, researchers have developed several BPM-specific solutions that extract information from textual documents using Natural Language Processing techniques. These solutions are specific to their respective tasks and cannot accomplish multiple process-related problems as a general-purpose instrument. However, in light of the recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with remarkable reasoning capabilities, such a general-purpose instrument with multiple applications now appears attainable. In this paper, we illustrate how LLMs can accomplish text-related BPM tasks by applying a specific LLM to three exemplary tasks: mining imperative process models from textual descriptions, mining declarative process models from textual descriptions, and assessing the suitability of process tasks from textual descriptions for robotic process automation. We show that, without extensive configuration or prompt engineering, LLMs perform comparably to or better than existing solutions and discuss implications for future BPM research as well as practical usage.

High-quality code documentation is crucial for software development especially in the era of AI. However, generating it automatically using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging, as existing approaches often produce incomplete, unhelpful, or factually incorrect outputs. We introduce DocAgent, a novel multi-agent collaborative system using topological code processing for incremental context building. Specialized agents (Reader, Searcher, Writer, Verifier, Orchestrator) then collaboratively generate documentation. We also propose a multi-faceted evaluation framework assessing Completeness, Helpfulness, and Truthfulness. Comprehensive experiments show DocAgent significantly outperforms baselines consistently. Our ablation study confirms the vital role of the topological processing order. DocAgent offers a robust approach for reliable code documentation generation in complex and proprietary repositories.

Creating new documents by synthesizing information from existing sources is an important part of knowledge work in many domains. This process often involves gathering content from multiple documents, organizing it, and then transforming it into new forms such as reports, slides, or spreadsheets. While recent advances in Generative AI have shown potential in automating parts of this process, they often provide limited user control over the handling of multimodal inputs and outputs. In this work, we introduce the notion of "infomorphs" which are modular, user-steerable, AI-augmented transformations that support controlled synthesis, and restructuring of information across formats and modalities. We propose a design space that leverage infomorph-driven workflows to enable flexible, interactive, and multimodal document creation by combining Generative AI techniques with user intent and desired information context. As a concrete instantiation of this design space, we present DocuCraft, a canvas-based interface to visually compose infomorph workflows. DocuCraft allows users to chain together infomorphs that perform operations such as page extraction, content summarization, reformatting, and generation, leveraging Generative AI at each stage to support rich, cross-document and cross-modal transformations. We demonstrate the capabilities of DocuCraft through an example-driven usage scenario that spans across different facets of common knowledge work tasks illustrating its support for fluid, human-in-the-loop document synthesis and highlights opportunities for more transparent and modular interaction for Generative AI-assisted information work.

Advances in AI-assisted research have introduced powerful tools for literature retrieval, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript preparation. However, systems remain fragmented and lack human-centred workflows. To address these gaps, we introduce AIssistant, an agentic, open-source Human-AI collaborative framework designed to simplify the end-to-end creation of scientific workflows. Since our development is still in an early stage, we present here the first experiments with AIssistant for perspective and review research papers in machine learning. Our system integrates modular tools and agents for literature synthesis, section-wise experimentation, citation management, and automatic LaTeX paper text generation, while maintaining human oversight at every stage to ensure accuracy, coherence, and scholarly rigour. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation across three layers: (1) Independent Human Review, following NeurIPS double-blind standards; (2) Automated LLM Review, using GPT-5 as a scalable human review proxy; and (3) Program Chair Oversight, where the chair monitors the entire review process and makes final validation and acceptance decisions. The results demonstrate that AIssistant improves drafting efficiency and thematic consistency. Nonetheless, Human-AI collaboration remains essential for maintaining factual correctness, methodological soundness, and ethical compliance. Despite its effectiveness, we identify key limitations, including hallucinated citations, difficulty adapting to dynamic paper structures, and incomplete integration of multimodal content.

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as analyzing literature, generating ideas, validating these ideas, interpreting results, and inspiring follow-up research. However, scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured. This makes it difficult for both human researchers and AI systems to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To address this issue, we introduce MASSW, a comprehensive text dataset on Multi-Aspect Summarization of Scientific Workflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications -- context, key idea, method, outcome, and projected impact -- which correspond to five key steps in the research workflow. These structured summaries facilitate a variety of downstream tasks and analyses. The quality of the LLM-extracted summaries is validated by comparing them with human annotations. We demonstrate the utility of MASSW through multiple novel machine-learning tasks that can be benchmarked using this new dataset, which make various types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. MASSW holds significant potential for researchers to create and benchmark new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation in the field. Our dataset is openly available at https://github.com/xingjian-zhang/massw.

The increasing adoption of agentic workflows across diverse domains brings a critical need to scalably and systematically evaluate the complex traces these systems generate. Current evaluation methods depend on manual, domain-specific human analysis of lengthy workflow traces - an approach that does not scale with the growing complexity and volume of agentic outputs. Error analysis in these settings is further complicated by the interplay of external tool outputs and language model reasoning, making it more challenging than traditional software debugging. In this work, we (1) articulate the need for robust and dynamic evaluation methods for agentic workflow traces, (2) introduce a formal taxonomy of error types encountered in agentic systems, and (3) present a set of 148 large human-annotated traces (TRAIL) constructed using this taxonomy and grounded in established agentic benchmarks. To ensure ecological validity, we curate traces from both single and multi-agent systems, focusing on real-world applications such as software engineering and open-world information retrieval. Our evaluations reveal that modern long context LLMs perform poorly at trace debugging, with the best Gemini-2.5-pro model scoring a mere 11% on TRAIL. Our dataset and code are made publicly available to support and accelerate future research in scalable evaluation for agentic workflows.

Traditional banks face increasing competition from FinTechs in the rapidly evolving financial ecosystem. Raising operational efficiency is vital to address this challenge. Our study aims to improve the efficiency of document-intensive business processes in banking. To that end, we first review the landscape of business documents in the retail segment. Banking documents often contain text, layout, and visuals, suggesting that document analytics and process automation require more than plain natural language processing (NLP). To verify this and assess the incremental value of visual cues when processing business documents, we compare a recently proposed multimodal model called LayoutXLM to powerful text classifiers (e.g., BERT) and large language models (e.g., GPT) in a case study related to processing company register extracts. The results confirm that incorporating layout information in a model substantially increases its performance. Interestingly, we also observed that more than 75% of the best model performance (in terms of the F1 score) can be achieved with as little as 30% of the training data. This shows that the demand for data labeled data to set up a multi-modal model can be moderate, which simplifies real-world applications of multimodal document analytics. Our study also sheds light on more specific practices in the scope of calibrating a multimodal banking document classifier, including the need for fine-tuning. In sum, the paper contributes original empirical evidence on the effectiveness and efficiency of multi-model models for document processing in the banking business and offers practical guidance on how to unlock this potential in day-to-day operations.

The practical use of text-to-image generation has evolved from simple, monolithic models to complex workflows that combine multiple specialized components. While workflow-based approaches can lead to improved image quality, crafting effective workflows requires significant expertise, owing to the large number of available components, their complex inter-dependence, and their dependence on the generation prompt. Here, we introduce the novel task of prompt-adaptive workflow generation, where the goal is to automatically tailor a workflow to each user prompt. We propose two LLM-based approaches to tackle this task: a tuning-based method that learns from user-preference data, and a training-free method that uses the LLM to select existing flows. Both approaches lead to improved image quality when compared to monolithic models or generic, prompt-independent workflows. Our work shows that prompt-dependent flow prediction offers a new pathway to improving text-to-image generation quality, complementing existing research directions in the field.

Enterprise documents, such as forms and reports, embed critical information for downstream applications like data archiving, automated workflows, and analytics. Although generalist Vision Language Models (VLMs) perform well on established document understanding benchmarks, their ability to conduct holistic, fine-grained structured extraction across diverse document types and flexible schemas is not well studied. Existing Key Entity Extraction (KEE), Relation Extraction (RE), and Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets are limited by narrow entity ontologies, simple queries, or homogeneous document types, often overlooking the need for adaptable and structured extraction. To address these gaps, we introduce ExStrucTiny, a new benchmark dataset for structured Information Extraction (IE) from document images, unifying aspects of KEE, RE, and VQA. Built through a novel pipeline combining manual and synthetic human-validated samples, ExStrucTiny covers more varied document types and extraction scenarios. We analyze open and closed VLMs on this benchmark, highlighting challenges such as schema adaptation, query under-specification, and answer localization. We hope our work provides a bedrock for improving generalist models for structured IE in documents.

Enterprise workflows increasingly rely on agents for schema-guided extraction: given a document and a user-defined schema, the agent faithfully follows the schema to produce the correct output with source evidence as grounding metadata. We present ExtractBench, a benchmark for schema-guided extraction and, to our knowledge, the first to score value accuracy, record completeness at scale, grounding, and measured cost together. The evaluation system contains 4,869 pages across 370 enterprise documents, 8 business domains, and 67 document types, with clear tags differentiating their challenge scenarios. The scalable schema and ground-truth curation pipeline combines independent-system agreement for real documents, known values for synthetic lists, and human verification for forms. We report order-insensitive value F1 for value accuracy, plus two grounding metrics for source traceability: word- and page-level F1. Commercial VLMs perform well on short documents but often truncate record lists on long ones, while coding agents retain higher accuracy at much higher cost. LlamaExtract Agentic Plus ranks first on all three metrics, with accuracy comparable to coding agents at a fraction of the cost. Dataset and evaluation code are available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/llamaindex/ExtractBench{HuggingFace} and https://github.com/run-llama/ExtractBench{GitHub}.

Autonomous research systems increasingly make the scientific workflow executable: agents can propose ideas, run code, inspect results, and draft papers. But executable workflows do not by themselves produce research judgment. We analyze where current systems lose trial experience: weak evidence becomes prose, pilot signals become broad claims, memory remains textual, and recurring process failures do not change later behavior. We introduce Sibyl-AutoResearch, a self-evolving AutoResearch framework built around Scientific Trial-and-Error Harnesses. A harness lets agents run bounded trials, preserve positive and negative outcomes, and route lessons into later planning, validation, claim scope, scheduling, critique, writing, and harness repair. We formalize this through two auditable conversion units: trial-to-behavior conversion, which links trial signals to later research actions, and trial-to-harness-behavior conversion, which links recurring process failures to system updates. We implement the framework in SIBYL, a file-backed autonomous research system that exposes the state, roles, memory, gates, and artifact traces needed to inspect these conversion paths. A retrospective audit identifies eight high-confidence conversion events, with a median latency of one iteration and a maximum latency of three iterations. A recovered-failure registry further shows how five naturally occurring failure classes, including duplicate results, stale numbers, and unsupported statistics, were blocked, downgraded, or routed into later repair. These traces do not establish a comparative performance claim; they show that the proposed conversion units are recoverable from realistic autonomous-research workspaces. The SIBYL framework and system are available at https://github.com/Sibyl-Research-Team/AutoResearch-SibylSystem.

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a widely adopted standard for representing complex business workflows. While BPMN diagrams are often exchanged as visual images, existing methods primarily rely on XML representations for computational analysis. In this work, we present a pipeline that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract structured JSON representations of BPMN diagrams directly from images, without requiring source model files or textual annotations. We also incorporate optical character recognition (OCR) for textual enrichment and evaluate the generated element lists against ground truth data derived from the source XML files. Our approach enables robust component extraction in scenarios where original source files are unavailable. We benchmark multiple VLMs and observe performance improvements in several models when OCR is used for text enrichment. In addition, we conducted extensive statistical analyses of OCR-based enrichment methods and prompt ablation studies, providing a clearer understanding of their impact on model performance.

The rapidly growing demand for high-quality data in Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for scalable, reliable, and semantically rich data preparation pipelines. However, current practices remain dominated by ad-hoc scripts and loosely specified workflows, which lack principled abstractions, hinder reproducibility, and offer limited support for model-in-the-loop data generation. To address these challenges, we present DataFlow, a unified and extensible LLM-driven data preparation framework. DataFlow is designed with system-level abstractions that enable modular, reusable, and composable data transformations, and provides a PyTorch-style pipeline construction API for building debuggable and optimizable dataflows. The framework consists of nearly 200 reusable operators and six domain-general pipelines spanning text, mathematical reasoning, code, Text-to-SQL, agentic RAG, and large-scale knowledge extraction. To further improve usability, we introduce DataFlow-Agent, which automatically translates natural-language specifications into executable pipelines via operator synthesis, pipeline planning, and iterative verification. Across six representative use cases, DataFlow consistently improves downstream LLM performance. Our math, code, and text pipelines outperform curated human datasets and specialized synthetic baselines, achieving up to +3\% execution accuracy in Text-to-SQL over SynSQL, +7\% average improvements on code benchmarks, and 1--3 point gains on MATH, GSM8K, and AIME. Moreover, a unified 10K-sample dataset produced by DataFlow enables base models to surpass counterparts trained on 1M Infinity-Instruct data. These results demonstrate that DataFlow provides a practical and high-performance substrate for reliable, reproducible, and scalable LLM data preparation, and establishes a system-level foundation for future data-centric AI development.

This paper introduces the Opus Prompt Intention Framework, designed to improve complex Workflow Generation with instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose an intermediate Intention Capture layer between user queries and Workflow Generation, implementing the Opus Workflow Intention Framework, which consists of extracting Workflow Signals from user queries, interpreting them into structured Workflow Intention objects, and generating Workflows based on these Intentions. Our results show that this layer enables LLMs to produce logical and meaningful outputs that scale reliably as query complexity increases. On a synthetic benchmark of 1,000 multi-intent query-Workflow(s) pairs, applying the Opus Prompt Intention Framework to Workflow Generation yields consistent improvements in semantic Workflow similarity metrics. In this paper, we introduce the Opus Prompt Intention Framework by applying the concepts of Workflow Signal and Workflow Intention to LLM-driven Workflow Generation. We present a reproducible, customizable LLM-based Intention Capture system to extract Workflow Signals and Workflow Intentions from user queries. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that the proposed system significantly improves Workflow Generation quality compared to direct generation from user queries, particularly in cases of Mixed Intention Elicitation.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex tasks across diverse domains, typically by employing agentic workflows that follow detailed instructions and operational sequences. However, constructing these workflows requires significant human effort, limiting scalability and generalizability. Recent research has sought to automate the generation and optimization of these workflows, but existing methods still rely on initial manual setup and fall short of achieving fully automated and effective workflow generation. To address this challenge, we reformulate workflow optimization as a search problem over code-represented workflows, where LLM-invoking nodes are connected by edges. We introduce AFlow, an automated framework that efficiently explores this space using Monte Carlo Tree Search, iteratively refining workflows through code modification, tree-structured experience, and execution feedback. Empirical evaluations across six benchmark datasets demonstrate AFlow's efficacy, yielding a 5.7% average improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, AFlow enables smaller models to outperform GPT-4o on specific tasks at 4.55% of its inference cost in dollars. The code will be available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

The accelerating pace of research on autoregressive generative models has produced thousands of papers, making manual literature surveys and reproduction studies increasingly impractical. We present a fully open-source, reproducible pipeline that automatically retrieves candidate documents from public repositories, filters them for relevance, extracts metadata, hyper-parameters and reported results, clusters topics, produces retrieval-augmented summaries and generates containerised scripts for re-running selected experiments. Quantitative evaluation on 50 manually-annotated papers shows F1 scores above 0.85 for relevance classification, hyper-parameter extraction and citation identification. Experiments on corpora of up to 1000 papers demonstrate near-linear scalability with eight CPU workers. Three case studies -- AWD-LSTM on WikiText-2, Transformer-XL on WikiText-103 and an autoregressive music model on the Lakh MIDI dataset -- confirm that the extracted settings support faithful reproduction, achieving test perplexities within 1--3% of the original reports.

Tool agents--LLM-based systems that interact with external APIs--offer a way to execute real-world tasks. However, as tasks become increasingly complex, these agents struggle to identify and call the correct APIs in the proper order. To tackle this problem, we investigate converting API documentation into a structured API graph that captures API dependencies and leveraging it for multi-tool queries that require compositional API calls. To support this, we introduce In-N-Out, the first expert-annotated dataset of API graphs built from two real-world API benchmarks and their documentation. Using In-N-Out significantly improves performance on both tool retrieval and multi-tool query generation, nearly doubling that of LLMs using documentation alone. Moreover, graphs generated by models fine-tuned on In-N-Out close 90% of this gap, showing that our dataset helps models learn to comprehend API documentation and parameter relationships. Our findings highlight the promise of using explicit API graphs for tool agents and the utility of In-N-Out as a valuable resource. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/holi-lab/In-N-Out-API-Graph.

As scientific research proliferates, researchers face the daunting task of navigating and reading vast amounts of literature. Existing solutions, such as document QA, fail to provide personalized and up-to-date information efficiently. We present Paper Copilot, a self-evolving, efficient LLM system designed to assist researchers, based on thought-retrieval, user profile and high performance optimization. Specifically, Paper Copilot can offer personalized research services, maintaining a real-time updated database. Quantitative evaluation demonstrates that Paper Copilot saves 69.92\% of time after efficient deployment. This paper details the design and implementation of Paper Copilot, highlighting its contributions to personalized academic support and its potential to streamline the research process.

Scientific research is being reshaped by AI systems that move beyond isolated assistance toward longer-horizon workflows spanning literature grounding, hypothesis generation, experimentation, validation, reporting, and revision. This shift marks a transition from task-level AI for science to workflow-level research automation. Yet current systems remain fragmented, differing in autonomy, domain scope, execution environment, validation mechanism, and human oversight, while still struggling with evidence preservation, reproducibility, weak-direction rejection, provenance tracking, cross-domain robustness, and accountable scientific closure. This survey examines these developments through AutoResearch, defined as the developmental spectrum of AI-powered scientific workflow automation. Within it, Vibe Research denotes the human-steered region of prompt-based assistance and human-verified execution, whereas emerging AI-led systems coordinate larger portions of the discovery loop without achieving robust autonomy. We analyze how research systems redistribute control, evidence, execution, validation, and accountability across workflows and organize the field around five workflow conditions: literature and research grounding; hypothesis formation and planning; experimentation and tool use; feedback, validation, and review; and reporting and knowledge communication. We further synthesize AI scientist systems, mixed-initiative co-research frameworks, benchmarks, domain deployments, and open-source infrastructures. Finally, we propose five evaluation dimensions--novelty, validity, impact, reliability, and provenance--and show that AutoResearch autonomy is domain-conditioned, being more credible in structured, executable, and rapidly verifiable settings but limited in embodied, delayed, heterogeneous, ethical, or institutionally accountable contexts.

There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intrinsic capabilities of the LLMs themselves. In our current work we focus on fine tuning LLaMA, an open source LLM using proprietary documents and code from an enterprise repository and use the fine tuned models to evaluate the quality of responses. As part of this work, we aim to guide beginners on how to start with fine tuning an LLM for documentation and code by making educated guesses on size of GPU required and options that are available for formatting the data. We also propose pre processing recipes for both documentation and code to prepare dataset in different formats. The proposed methods of data preparation for document datasets are forming paragraph chunks, forming question and answer pairs and forming keyword and paragraph chunk pairs. For code dataset we propose forming summary and function pairs. Further, we qualitatively evaluate the results of the models for domain specific queries. Finally, we also propose practical guidelines and recommendations for fine tuning LLMs.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is increasingly deployed in enterprise search and document-centric assistants, where responses must be grounded in long and complex source materials. In practice, verifying that generated answers faithfully reflect retrieved documents is difficult: large language models can check long contexts but are too slow and costly for interactive services, while lightweight classifiers operate within strict context limits and frequently miss evidence outside truncated passages. We present the design of a real-time verification component integrated into a production RAG pipeline that enables full-document grounding under latency constraints. The system processes documents up to 32K tokens and employs adaptive inference strategies to balance response time and verification coverage across workloads. We describe the architectural decisions, operational trade-offs, and evaluation methodology used to deploy the verifier, and show that full-context verification substantially improves detection of unsupported responses compared with truncated validation. Our experience highlights when long-context verification is necessary, why chunk-based checking often fails in real documents, and how latency budgets shape model design. These findings provide practical guidance for practitioners building reliable large-scale retrieval-augmented applications. (Model, benchmark, and code: https://huggingface.co/llm-semantic-router)

As academic paper publication numbers grow exponentially, conducting in-depth surveys with LLMs automatically has become an inevitable trend. Outline writing, which aims to systematically organize related works, is critical for automated survey generation. Yet existing automatic survey methods treat outline writing as mere workflow steps in the overall pipeline. Such template-based workflows produce outlines that lack in-depth understanding of the survey topic and fine-grained styles. To address these limitations, we propose Meow, the first metadata-driven outline writing framework that produces organized and faithful outlines efficiently. Specifically, we first formulate outline writing as an end-to-end task that generates hierarchical structured outlines from paper metadata. We then curate a high-quality dataset of surveys from arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, and establish systematic evaluation metrics for outline quality assessment. Finally, we employ a two-stage training approach combining supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Our 8B reasoning model demonstrates strong performance with high structural fidelity and stylistic coherence.

ResearchPilot is an open-source, self-hostable multi-agent system for literature-review assistance. Given a natural-language research question, it retrieves papers from Semantic Scholar and arXiv, extracts structured findings from paper abstracts, synthesizes cross-paper patterns, and drafts a citation-aware related-work section. The system combines FastAPI, Next.js, DSPy, SQLite, and Qdrant in a local-first architecture that supports bring-your-own-key model access and remote-or-local embeddings. This paper describes the system design, typed agent interfaces, persistence and history-search mechanisms, and the engineering tradeoffs involved in building a transparent research assistant. Rather than claiming algorithmic novelty, we present ResearchPilot as a systems contribution and evaluate it through automated tests and end-to-end local runs. We discuss limitations including external API rate limits, abstract-only extraction, incomplete corpus coverage, and the lack of citation verification.

Reproducibility is central to research credibility, yet large-scale reanalysis of empricial data remains costly because replication packages vary widely in structure, software environment, and documentation. We develop and evaluate an agentic AI workflow that addresses this execution bottleneck while preserving scientific rigor. The system separates scientific reasoning from computational execution: researchers design fixed diagnostic templates, and the workflow automates the acquisition, harmonization, and execution of replication materials using pre-specified, version-controlled code. A structured knowledge layer records resolved failure patterns, enabling adaptation across heterogeneous studies while keeping each pipeline version transparent and stable. We evaluate this workflow on 92 instrumental variable (IV) studies, including 67 with manually verified reproducible 2SLS estimates and 25 newly published IV studies under identical criteria. For each paper, we analyze up to three two-stage least squares (2SLS) specifications, totaling 215. Across the 92 papers, the system achieves 87% end-to-end success overall. Conditional on accessible data and code, reproducibility is 100% at both the paper and specification levels. The framework substantially lowers the cost of executing established empirical protocols and can be adapted in empirical settings where analytic templates and norms of transparency are well established.

Metadata extraction is essential for cataloging and preserving datasets, enabling effective research discovery and reproducibility, especially given the current exponential growth in scientific research. While Masader (Alyafeai et al.,2021) laid the groundwork for extracting a wide range of metadata attributes from Arabic NLP datasets' scholarly articles, it relies heavily on manual annotation. In this paper, we present MOLE, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract metadata attributes from scientific papers covering datasets of languages other than Arabic. Our schema-driven methodology processes entire documents across multiple input formats and incorporates robust validation mechanisms for consistent output. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark to evaluate the research progress on this task. Through systematic analysis of context length, few-shot learning, and web browsing integration, we demonstrate that modern LLMs show promising results in automating this task, highlighting the need for further future work improvements to ensure consistent and reliable performance. We release the code: https://github.com/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE and dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE for the research community.

The rapid increase in unstructured data across various fields has made multi-document comprehension and summarization a critical task. Traditional approaches often fail to capture relevant context, maintain logical consistency, and extract essential information from lengthy documents. This paper explores the use of Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-document summarization, demonstrating their exceptional capacity to grasp extensive connections, provide cohesive summaries, and adapt to various industry domains and integration with enterprise applications/systems. The paper discusses the workflow of multi-document summarization for effectively deploying long-context LLMs, supported by case studies in legal applications, enterprise functions such as HR, finance, and sourcing, as well as in the medical and news domains. These case studies show notable enhancements in both efficiency and accuracy. Technical obstacles, such as dataset diversity, model scalability, and ethical considerations like bias mitigation and factual accuracy, are carefully analyzed. Prospective research avenues are suggested to augment the functionalities and applications of long-context LLMs, establishing them as pivotal tools for transforming information processing across diverse sectors and enterprise applications.

AI documentation is a rapidly-growing channel for coordinating the design of AI technologies with policies for transparency and accessibility. Calls to standardize and enact documentation of algorithmic harms and impacts are now commonplace. However, documentation standards for AI remain inchoate, and fail to match the capabilities and social effects of increasingly impactful architectures such as Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we show the limits of present documentation protocols, and argue for dynamic documentation as a new paradigm for understanding and evaluating AI systems. We first review canonical approaches to system documentation outside the context of AI, focusing on the complex history of Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). We next compare critical elements of the EIS framework to present challenges with algorithmic documentation, which have inherited the limitations of EISs without incorporating their strengths. These challenges are specifically illustrated through the growing popularity of Model Cards and two case studies of algorithmic impact assessment in China and Canada. Finally, we evaluate more recent proposals, including Reward Reports, as potential components of fully dynamic AI documentation protocols.

This paper presents OG-RAG, an Ontology-Grounded Retrieval Augmented Generation method designed to enhance LLM-generated responses by anchoring retrieval processes in domain-specific ontologies. While LLMs are widely used for tasks like question answering and search, they struggle to adapt to specialized knowledge, such as industrial workflows or knowledge work, without expensive fine-tuning or sub-optimal retrieval methods. Existing retrieval-augmented models, such as RAG, offer improvements but fail to account for structured domain knowledge, leading to suboptimal context generation. Ontologies, which conceptually organize domain knowledge by defining entities and their interrelationships, offer a structured representation to address this gap. OG-RAG constructs a hypergraph representation of domain documents, where each hyperedge encapsulates clusters of factual knowledge grounded using domain-specific ontology. An optimization algorithm then retrieves the minimal set of hyperedges that constructs a precise, conceptually grounded context for the LLM. This method enables efficient retrieval while preserving the complex relationships between entities. OG-RAG applies to domains where fact-based reasoning is essential, particularly in tasks that require workflows or decision-making steps to follow predefined rules and procedures. These include industrial workflows in healthcare, legal, and agricultural sectors, as well as knowledge-driven tasks such as news journalism, investigative research, consulting and more. Our evaluations demonstrate that OG-RAG increases the recall of accurate facts by 55% and improves response correctness by 40% across four different LLMs. Additionally, OG-RAG enables 30% faster attribution of responses to context and boosts fact-based reasoning accuracy by 27% compared to baseline methods.

Deep research has revolutionized data analysis, yet data scientists still devote substantial time to manually crafting visualizations, highlighting the need for robust automation from natural language queries. However, current systems struggle with complex datasets containing multiple files and iterative refinement. Existing approaches, including simple single- or multi-agent systems, often oversimplify the task, focusing on initial query parsing while failing to robustly manage data complexity, code errors, or final visualization quality. In this paper, we reframe this challenge as a collaborative multi-agent problem. We introduce CoDA, a multi-agent system that employs specialized LLM agents for metadata analysis, task planning, code generation, and self-reflection. We formalize this pipeline, demonstrating how metadata-focused analysis bypasses token limits and quality-driven refinement ensures robustness. Extensive evaluations show CoDA achieves substantial gains in the overall score, outperforming competitive baselines by up to 41.5%. This work demonstrates that the future of visualization automation lies not in isolated code generation but in integrated, collaborative agentic workflows.

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) for regulatory compliance demands rigorous traceability via comprehensive citations across multi-tiered authority structures. Unlike traditional multi-hop or legal QA, this task requires structured procedural lookups and evidence-set closure rather than entity resolution or case-law reasoning. Existing RAG systems struggle here due to flattened citation edges, fragmented retrieval expansions, and fragile post-hoc attribution. We formalize Regulatory Compliance QA with RegOps-Bench, a novel benchmark featuring an Operational Knowledge Graph derived from complex national R\&D regulations. To address these bottlenecks, we propose RefWalk, a unified framework driven by a shared topic anchor. RefWalk traverses cross-document citations, fuses multi-view candidates via max-based aggregation, and enforces per-rule attribution to explicitly map claims to sources. We establish a strong baseline with substantial improvements in retrieval recall and citation accuracy. Finally, a contrastive evaluation on a U.S. health compliance dataset (HIPAA) reveals that existing systems exhibit saturation on flat-structure rules, underscoring the need for RegOps-Bench. Our code is available at https://github.com/yeongjoonJu/RefWalk.

Language models (LMs) can perform complex reasoning either end-to-end, with hidden latent state, or compositionally, with transparent intermediate state. Composition offers benefits for interpretability and safety, but may need workflow support and infrastructure to remain competitive. We describe iterated decomposition, a human-in-the-loop workflow for developing and refining compositional LM programs. We improve the performance of compositions by zooming in on failing components and refining them through decomposition, additional context, chain of thought, etc. To support this workflow, we develop ICE, an open-source tool for visualizing the execution traces of LM programs. We apply iterated decomposition to three real-world tasks and improve the accuracy of LM programs over less compositional baselines: describing the placebo used in a randomized controlled trial (25% to 65%), evaluating participant adherence to a medical intervention (53% to 70%), and answering NLP questions on the Qasper dataset (38% to 69%). These applications serve as case studies for a workflow that, if automated, could keep ML systems interpretable and safe even as they scale to increasingly complex tasks.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have revolutionized information retrieval and question answering, but traditional text-based chunking methods struggle with complex document structures, multi-page tables, embedded figures, and contextual dependencies across page boundaries. We present a novel multimodal document chunking approach that leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to process PDF documents in batches while maintaining semantic coherence and structural integrity. Our method processes documents in configurable page batches with cross-batch context preservation, enabling accurate handling of tables spanning multiple pages, embedded visual elements, and procedural content. We evaluate our approach on a curated dataset of PDF documents with manually crafted queries, demonstrating improvements in chunk quality and downstream RAG performance. Our vision-guided approach achieves better accuracy compared to traditional vanilla RAG systems, with qualitative analysis showing superior preservation of document structure and semantic coherence.

The expanding Lean 4 ecosystem poses challenges for navigating its vast libraries. This paper introduces LeanExplore, a search engine for Lean 4 declarations. LeanExplore enables users to semantically search for statements, both formally and informally, across select Lean 4 packages (including Batteries, Init, Lean, Mathlib, PhysLean, and Std). This search capability is powered by a hybrid ranking strategy, integrating scores from a multi-source semantic embedding model (capturing conceptual meaning from formal Lean code, docstrings, AI-generated informal translations, and declaration titles), BM25+ for keyword-based lexical relevance, and a PageRank-based score reflecting declaration importance and interconnectedness. The search engine is accessible via a dedicated website (https://www.leanexplore.com/) and a Python API (https://github.com/justincasher/lean-explore). Furthermore, the database can be downloaded, allowing users to self-host the service. LeanExplore integrates easily with LLMs via the model context protocol (MCP), enabling users to chat with an AI assistant about Lean declarations or utilize the search engine for building theorem-proving agents. This work details LeanExplore's architecture, data processing, functionalities, and its potential to enhance Lean 4 workflows and AI-driven mathematical research

The performance of automatic code documentation generation models depends critically on the quality of the training data used for supervision. However, most existing code documentation datasets are constructed through large scale scraping of public repositories with limited quality control. As a result, they often contain noisy documentation, extensive duplication, and increasing contamination from AI generated content. These issues weaken the supervision signal available to learning-based models and complicate evaluation. We introduce Code2Doc, a quality-first curated dataset for function-level code documentation generation. Code2Doc consists of 13,358 high-quality function-documentation pairs extracted from widely used open-source repositories spanning five programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, and C++. The dataset is constructed using a four-stage curation pipeline that enforces documentation completeness and clarity, filters functions based on structural and complexity criteria, removes exact and near-duplicate code, and identifies documentation likely to be AI generated. Starting from 52,069 extracted candidates, only 25.6% satisfy all quality constraints. We provide a detailed analysis of the resulting dataset, which achieves a mean documentation quality score of 6.93 out of 10. Overall, 86.9% of samples contain explicit type annotations, and only 2.9% are flagged as potentially AI generated. Baseline experiments show that fine-tuning a large language model on Code2Doc yields relative improvements of 29.47% in BLEU and 24.04% in ROUGE-L over zero shot performance, despite the modest dataset size. We release both the dataset and the full curation pipeline to support reproducible research on automatic code documentation generation.

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their exceptional ability to handle a wide range of tasks, have driven significant advancements in tackling reasoning and planning tasks, wherein decomposing complex problems into executable workflows is a crucial step in this process. Existing workflow evaluation frameworks either focus solely on holistic performance or suffer from limitations such as restricted scenario coverage, simplistic workflow structures, and lax evaluation standards. To this end, we introduce WorFBench, a unified workflow generation benchmark with multi-faceted scenarios and intricate graph workflow structures. Additionally, we present WorFEval, a systemic evaluation protocol utilizing subsequence and subgraph matching algorithms to accurately quantify the LLM agent's workflow generation capabilities. Through comprehensive evaluations across different types of LLMs, we discover distinct gaps between the sequence planning capabilities and graph planning capabilities of LLM agents, with even GPT-4 exhibiting a gap of around 15%. We also train two open-source models and evaluate their generalization abilities on held-out tasks. Furthermore, we observe that the generated workflows can enhance downstream tasks, enabling them to achieve superior performance with less time during inference. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WorFBench.

This paper introduces the task of analytical question answering over large, semi-structured document collections. We present MuDABench, a benchmark for multi-document analytical QA, where questions require extracting and synthesizing information across numerous documents to perform quantitative analysis. Unlike existing multi-document QA benchmarks that typically require information from only a few documents with limited cross-document reasoning, MuDABench demands extensive inter-document analysis and aggregation. Constructed via distant supervision by leveraging document-level metadata and annotated financial databases, MuDABench comprises over 80,000 pages and 332 analytical QA instances. We also propose an evaluation protocol that measures final answer accuracy and uses intermediate-fact coverage as an auxiliary diagnostic signal for the reasoning process. Experiments reveal that standard RAG systems, which treat all documents as a flat retrieval pool, perform poorly. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-agent workflow that orchestrates planning, extraction, and code generation modules. While this approach substantially improves both process and outcome metrics, a significant gap remains compared to human expert performance. Our analysis identifies two primary bottlenecks: single-document information extraction accuracy and insufficient domain-specific knowledge in current systems. MuDABench is available at https://github.com/Zhanli-Li/MuDABench.

Digitization projects in humanities often generate vast quantities of page images from historical documents, presenting significant challenges for manual sorting and analysis. These archives contain diverse content, including various text types (handwritten, typed, printed), graphical elements (drawings, maps, photos), and layouts (plain text, tables, forms). Efficiently processing this heterogeneous data requires automated methods to categorize pages based on their content, enabling tailored downstream analysis pipelines. This project addresses this need by developing and evaluating an image classification system specifically designed for historical document pages, leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The set of categories was chosen to facilitate content-specific processing workflows, separating pages requiring different analysis techniques (e.g., OCR for text, image analysis for graphics)

Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to accelerate frontier scientific research is promising, yet how to rigorously evaluate such systems remains unclear. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on single-document understanding, whereas real scientific workflows require integrating evidence from multiple papers, including their text, tables, and figures. As a result, multi-modal, multi-document scientific reasoning remains underexplored and lacks systematic evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce PaperScope, a multi-modal multi-document benchmark designed for agentic deep research. PaperScope presents three advantages: (1) Structured scientific grounding. It is built on a knowledge graph of over 2,000 AI papers spanning three years, providing a structured foundation for research-oriented queries. (2) Semantically dense evidence construction. It integrates semantically related key information nodes and employs optimized random-walk article selector to sample thematically coherent paper sets, thereby ensuring adequate semantic density and task complexity. (3) Multi-task evaluation of scientific reasoning. It contains over 2,000 QA pairs across reasoning, retrieval, summarization, and problem solving, enabling evaluation of multi-step scientific reasoning. Experimental results show that even advanced systems such as OpenAI Deep Research and Tongyi Deep Research achieve limited scores on PaperScope, highlighting the difficulty of long-context retrieval and deep multi-source reasoning. PaperScope thus provides a rigorous benchmark alongside a scalable pipeline for constructing large-scale multi-modal, multi-source deep research datasets.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

We present and evaluate a suite of proof-of-concept (PoC), structured workflow prompts designed to elicit human-like hierarchical reasoning while guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) in the high-level semantic and linguistic analysis of scholarly manuscripts. The prompts target two non-trivial analytical tasks within academic summaries (abstracts and conclusions): identifying unsubstantiated claims (informational integrity) and flagging semantically confusing ambiguous pronoun references (linguistic clarity). We conducted a systematic, multi-run evaluation on two frontier models (Gemini Pro 2.5 Pro and ChatGPT Plus o3) under varied context conditions. Our results for the informational integrity task reveal a significant divergence in model performance: while both models successfully identified an unsubstantiated head of a noun phrase (95% success), ChatGPT consistently failed (0% success) to identify an unsubstantiated adjectival modifier that Gemini correctly flagged (95% success), raising a question regarding the potential influence of the target's syntactic role. For the linguistic analysis task, both models performed well (80-90% success) with full manuscript context. Surprisingly, in a summary-only setting, Gemini's performance was substantially degraded, while ChatGPT achieved a perfect (100%) success rate. Our findings suggest that while structured prompting is a viable methodology for complex textual analysis, prompt performance may be highly dependent on the interplay between the model, task type, and context, highlighting the need for rigorous, model-specific testing.

Document understanding is critical for applications from financial analysis to scientific discovery. Current approaches, whether OCR-based pipelines feeding Large Language Models (LLMs) or native Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), face key limitations: the former loses structural detail, while the latter struggles with context modeling. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps ground models in external data, but documents' multimodal nature, i.e., combining text, tables, charts, and layout, demands a more advanced paradigm: Multimodal RAG. This approach enables holistic retrieval and reasoning across all modalities, unlocking comprehensive document intelligence. Recognizing its importance, this paper presents a systematic survey of Multimodal RAG for document understanding. We propose a taxonomy based on domain, retrieval modality, and granularity, and review advances involving graph structures and agentic frameworks. We also summarize key datasets, benchmarks, and applications, and highlight open challenges in efficiency, fine-grained representation, and robustness, providing a roadmap for future progress in document AI.

Assessing journal legitimacy during literature reviews, publication venue selection, and citation verification requires consulting information scattered across multiple incompatible data-sets. This paper introduces Aletheia-Probe, an open-source tool that systematically aggregates curated databases and pattern analysis from multiple authoritative sources to provide transparent, confidence-scored journal assessments. The tool explicitly reports which sources were consulted, what each found, and where evidence conflicts. The tool integrates into research workflows through command-line and programmatic interfaces. It reduces manual assessment overhead while explicitly flagging uncertain cases. We present the tool's architecture, core design principles, and practical integration approach. Comprehensive empirical validation will be presented in forthcoming work.

Automated paper reproduction has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate scientific research, employing multi-step workflow frameworks to systematically convert academic papers into executable code. However, existing frameworks often lack mechanisms to verify and refine the outputs at each generation step, or rely heavily on manually designed prompts for self-refinement, which limits their adaptability and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose a prompt-free collaborative agent framework that automatically enhances the quality of paper-to-code generation. Our approach employs two collaborative agents: a verification agent that examines whether the outputs at each step satisfy the requirements specified in the corresponding system prompt, and a refinement agent that revises the outputs based on the identified issues. Unlike previous methods that require human experts to craft specific refinement prompts for each step, our framework achieves automatic verification and improvement by leveraging only the original system prompts. We integrate our collaborative agents into the Paper2Code framework and conduct comprehensive experiments on PaperBench Code-Dev and Paper2CodeBench datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the accuracy and completeness of reproduced code, achieving performance gains of approximately 15\% and 13\%, respectively, compared to the baseline without our agents. Furthermore, comparative experiments against Self-Refine validate the robustness and consistency of our prompt-free approach across different datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how researchers in materials science and chemistry discover, organize, and act on scientific knowledge. This paper analyzes a broad set of community-developed LLM applications in an effort to identify emerging patterns in how these systems can be used across the scientific research lifecycle. We organize the projects into two complementary categories: Knowledge Infrastructure, systems that structure, retrieve, synthesize, and validate scientific information; and Action Systems, systems that execute, coordinate, or automate scientific work across computational and experimental environments. The submissions reveal a shift from single-purpose LLM tools toward integrated, multi-agent workflows that combine retrieval, reasoning, tool use, and domain-specific validation. Prominent themes include retrieval-augmented generation as grounding infrastructure, persistent structured knowledge representations, multimodal and multilingual scientific inputs, and early progress toward laboratory-integrated closed-loop systems. Together, these results suggest that LLMs are evolving from general-purpose assistants into composable infrastructure for scientific reasoning and action. This work provides a community snapshot of that transition and a practical taxonomy for understanding emerging LLM-enabled workflows in materials science and chemistry.

Large Language Models provide significant new opportunities for the generation of high-quality written works. However, their employment in the research community is inhibited by their tendency to hallucinate invalid sources and lack of direct access to a knowledge base of relevant scientific articles. In this work, we present Citegeist: An application pipeline using dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) on the arXiv Corpus to generate a related work section and other citation-backed outputs. For this purpose, we employ a mixture of embedding-based similarity matching, summarization, and multi-stage filtering. To adapt to the continuous growth of the document base, we also present an optimized way of incorporating new and modified papers. To enable easy utilization in the scientific community, we release both, a website (https://citegeist.org), as well as an implementation harness that works with several different LLM implementations.

Document analysis and understanding models often require extensive annotated data to be trained. However, various document-related tasks extend beyond mere text transcription, requiring both textual content and precise bounding-box annotations to identify different document elements. Collecting such data becomes particularly challenging, especially in the context of invoices, where privacy concerns add an additional layer of complexity. In this paper, we introduce FATURA, a pivotal resource for researchers in the field of document analysis and understanding. FATURA is a highly diverse dataset featuring multi-layout, annotated invoice document images. Comprising 10,000 invoices with 50 distinct layouts, it represents the largest openly accessible image dataset of invoice documents known to date. We also provide comprehensive benchmarks for various document analysis and understanding tasks and conduct experiments under diverse training and evaluation scenarios. The dataset is freely accessible at https://zenodo.org/record/8261508, empowering researchers to advance the field of document analysis and understanding.

Data science, which transforms raw data into actionable insights, is critical for data-driven decision-making. However, these tasks are often complex, involving steps for exploring multiple data sources and synthesizing findings to deliver insightful answers. While large language models (LLMs) show significant promise in automating this process, they often struggle with heterogeneous data formats and generate sub-optimal analysis plans, as verifying plan sufficiency is inherently difficult without ground-truth labels for such open-ended tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce DS-STAR, a novel data science agent. Specifically, DS-STAR makes three key contributions: (1) a data file analysis module that automatically explores and extracts context from diverse data formats, including unstructured types; (2) a verification step where an LLM-based judge evaluates the sufficiency of the analysis plan at each stage; and (3) a sequential planning mechanism that starts with a simple, executable plan and iteratively refines it based on the DS-STAR's feedback until its sufficiency is verified. This iterative refinement allows DS-STAR to reliably navigate complex analyses involving diverse data sources. Our experiments show that DS-STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three challenging benchmarks: DABStep, KramaBench, and DA-Code. Moreover, DS-STAR particularly outperforms baselines on hard tasks that require processing multiple data files with heterogeneous formats.

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) built on large language models typically solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents through workflows. Existing approaches generates workflows either at task level or query level, but their relative costs and benefits remain unclear. After rethinking and empirical analyses, we show that query-level workflow generation is not always necessary, since a small set of top-K best task-level workflows together already covers equivalent or even more queries. We further find that exhaustive execution-based task-level evaluation is both extremely token-costly and frequently unreliable. Inspired by the idea of self-evolution and generative reward modeling, we propose a low-cost task-level generation framework SCALE, which means \textbf{S}elf prediction of the optimizer with few shot \textbf{CAL}ibration for \textbf{E}valuation instead of full validation execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCALE maintains competitive performance, with an average degradation of just 0.61\% compared to existing approach across multiple datasets, while cutting overall token usage by up to 83\%.

Business Document Information Extraction (BDIE) is the problem of transforming a blob of unstructured information (raw text, scanned documents, etc.) into a structured format that downstream systems can parse and use. It has two main tasks: Key-Information Extraction (KIE) and Line Items Recognition (LIR). In this paper, we argue that BDIE is best modeled as a Tool Use problem, where the tools are these downstream systems. We then present Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation (RASG), a novel general framework for BDIE that achieves state of the art (SOTA) results on both KIE and LIR tasks on BDIE benchmarks. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) We show, with ablation benchmarks, that Large Language Models (LLMs) with RASG are already competitive with or surpasses current SOTA Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) without RASG on BDIE benchmarks. (2) We propose a new metric class for Line Items Recognition, General Line Items Recognition Metric (GLIRM), that is more aligned with practical BDIE use cases compared to existing metrics, such as ANLS*, DocILE, and GriTS. (3) We provide a heuristic algorithm for backcalculating bounding boxes of predicted line items and tables without the need for vision encoders. Finally, we claim that, while LMMs might sometimes offer marginal performance benefits, LLMs + RASG is oftentimes superior given real-world applications and constraints of BDIE.

REST APIs play important roles in enriching the action space of web agents, yet most API-based agents rely on curated and uniform toolsets that do not reflect the complexity of real-world APIs. Building tool-using agents for arbitrary domains remains a major challenge, as it requires reading unstructured API documentation, testing APIs and inferring correct parameters. We propose Doc2Agent, a scalable pipeline to build agents that can call Python-based tools generated from API documentation. Doc2Agent generates executable tools from API documentations and iteratively refines them using a code agent. We evaluate our approach on real-world APIs, WebArena APIs, and research APIs, producing validated tools. We achieved a 55\% relative performance improvement with 90\% lower cost compared to direct API calling on WebArena benchmark. A domain-specific agent built for glycomaterial science further demonstrates the pipeline's adaptability to complex, knowledge-rich tasks. Doc2Agent offers a generalizable solution for building tool agents from unstructured API documentation at scale.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to disrupt knowledge work, with the emergence of delegated work as a new interaction paradigm (e.g., vibe coding). Delegation requires trust - the expectation that the LLM will faithfully execute the task without introducing errors into documents. We introduce DELEGATE-52 to study the readiness of AI systems in delegated workflows. DELEGATE-52 simulates long delegated workflows that require in-depth document editing across 52 professional domains, such as coding, crystallography, and music notation. Our large-scale experiment with 19 LLMs reveals that current models degrade documents during delegation: even frontier models (Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude 4.6 Opus, GPT 5.4) corrupt an average of 25% of document content by the end of long workflows, with other models failing more severely. Additional experiments reveal that agentic tool use does not improve performance on DELEGATE-52, and that degradation severity is exacerbated by document size, length of interaction, or presence of distractor files. Our analysis shows that current LLMs are unreliable delegates: they introduce sparse but severe errors that silently corrupt documents, compounding over long interaction.

Scientific research involves complex information-seeking and reasoning workflows across heterogeneous sources. However, existing benchmarks primarily emphasize general-domain retrieval or static scientific question answering, and therefore fail to assess key capabilities required in realistic scientific research workflows. We introduce SciExplore, a benchmark designed to evaluate scientific information-seeking and reasoning capabilities of LLMs and agents. SciExplore comprises four task types covering 103 expert-curated tasks across more than ten scientific disciplines: scientific database navigation, ambiguous literature retrieval, missing reference completion, and cross-source structured knowledge synthesis, which probe progressively higher-level abilities from entity-level reasoning and document-level identification to evidence-level grounding and domain-level synthesis. We evaluate over ten state-of-the-art LLMs and autonomous agents on SciExplore, revealing substantial performance gaps with performance degrading sharply as task complexity increases and extremely low accuracy on the most challenging structured synthesis tasks. These results highlight significant limitations of current models and agents in realistic scientific information-seeking scenarios.

Much previous AI research has focused on developing monolithic models to maximize their intelligence and capability, with the primary goal of enhancing performance on specific tasks. In contrast, this paper explores an alternative approach: collaborative AI systems that use workflows to integrate models, data sources, and pipelines to solve complex and diverse tasks. We introduce GenAgent, an LLM-based framework that automatically generates complex workflows, offering greater flexibility and scalability compared to monolithic models. The core innovation of GenAgent lies in representing workflows with code, alongside constructing workflows with collaborative agents in a step-by-step manner. We implement GenAgent on the ComfyUI platform and propose a new benchmark, OpenComfy. The results demonstrate that GenAgent outperforms baseline approaches in both run-level and task-level evaluations, showing its capability to generate complex workflows with superior effectiveness and stability.

Automatic workflow generation is the process of automatically synthesizing sequences of LLM calls, tool invocations, and post-processing steps for complex end-to-end tasks. Most prior methods cast this task as an optimization problem with limited theoretical grounding. We propose to cast workflow generation as Bayesian inference over a posterior distribution on workflows, and introduce Bayesian Workflow Generation (BWG), a sampling framework that builds workflows step-by-step using parallel look-ahead rollouts for importance weighting and a sequential in-loop refiner for pool-wide improvements. We prove that, without the refiner, the weighted empirical distribution converges to the target posterior. We instantiate BWG as BayesFlow, a training-free algorithm for workflow construction. Across six benchmark datasets, BayesFlow improves accuracy by up to 9 percentage points over SOTA workflow generation baselines and by up to 65 percentage points over zero-shot prompting, establishing BWG as a principled upgrade to search-based workflow design. Code will be available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/BayesFlow.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly touted as powerful tools for automating scientific information extraction. However, existing methods and tools often struggle with the realities of scientific literature: long-context documents, multi-modal content, and reconciling varied and inconsistent fine-grained information across multiple publications into standardized formats. These challenges are further compounded when the desired data schema or extraction ontology changes rapidly, making it difficult to re-architect or fine-tune existing systems. We present SciEx, a modular and composable framework that decouples key components including PDF parsing, multi-modal retrieval, extraction, and aggregation. This design streamlines on-demand data extraction while enabling extensibility and flexible integration of new models, prompting strategies, and reasoning mechanisms. We evaluate SciEx on datasets spanning three scientific topics for its ability to extract fine-grained information accurately and consistently. Our findings provide practical insights into both the strengths and limitations of current LLM-based pipelines.

Analyzing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) from large volumes of data is critical for drafting and publishing comprehensive CTI reports. This process usually follows a three-stage workflow -- triage, deep search and TI drafting. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising route toward automation, existing benchmarks still have limitations. These benchmarks often consist of tasks that do not reflect real-world analyst workflows. For example, human analysts rarely receive tasks in the form of multiple-choice questions. Also, existing benchmarks often rely on model-centric metrics that emphasize lexical overlap rather than actionable, detailed insights essential for security analysts. Moreover, they typically fail to cover the complete three-stage workflow. To address these issues, we introduce CyberThreat-Eval, which is collected from the daily CTI workflow of a world-leading company. This expert-annotated benchmark assesses LLMs on practical tasks across all three stages as mentioned above. It utilizes analyst-centric metrics that measure factual accuracy, content quality, and operational costs. Our evaluation using this benchmark reveals important insights into the limitations of current LLMs. For example, LLMs often lack the nuanced expertise required to handle complex details and struggle to distinguish between correct and incorrect information. To address these challenges, the CTI workflow incorporates both external ground-truth databases and human expert knowledge. TRA allows human experts to iteratively provide feedback for continuous improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/xschen-beb/CyberThreat-Eval{GitHub} and https://huggingface.co/datasets/xse/CyberThreat-Eval{HuggingFace}.

Real-world RAG applications often encounter long-context input scenarios, where redundant information and noise results in higher inference costs and reduced performance. To address these challenges, we propose LongRefiner, an efficient plug-and-play refiner that leverages the inherent structural characteristics of long documents. LongRefiner employs dual-level query analysis, hierarchical document structuring, and adaptive refinement through multi-task learning on a single foundation model. Experiments on seven QA datasets demonstrate that LongRefiner achieves competitive performance in various scenarios while using 10x fewer computational costs and latency compared to the best baseline. Further analysis validates that LongRefiner is scalable, efficient, and effective, providing practical insights for real-world long-text RAG applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/LongRefiner.

Even for a conservative estimate, 80% of enterprise data reside in unstructured files, stored in data lakes that accommodate heterogeneous formats. Classical search engines can no longer meet information seeking needs, especially when the task is to browse and explore for insight formulation. In other words, there are no obvious search keywords to use. Knowledge graphs, due to their natural visual appeals that reduce the human cognitive load, become the winning candidate for heterogeneous data integration and knowledge representation. In this paper, we introduce Docs2KG, a novel framework designed to extract multimodal information from diverse and heterogeneous unstructured documents, including emails, web pages, PDF files, and Excel files. Dynamically generates a unified knowledge graph that represents the extracted key information, Docs2KG enables efficient querying and exploration of document data lakes. Unlike existing approaches that focus on domain-specific data sources or pre-designed schemas, Docs2KG offers a flexible and extensible solution that can adapt to various document structures and content types. The proposed framework unifies data processing supporting a multitude of downstream tasks with improved domain interpretability. Docs2KG is publicly accessible at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com, and a demonstration video is available at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com/Video.

In enterprise settings, efficiently retrieving relevant information from large and complex knowledge bases is essential for operational productivity and informed decision-making. This research presents a systematic framework for metadata enrichment using large language models (LLMs) to enhance document retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Our approach employs a comprehensive, structured pipeline that dynamically generates meaningful metadata for document segments, substantially improving their semantic representations and retrieval accuracy. Through extensive experiments, we compare three chunking strategies-semantic, recursive, and naive-and evaluate their effectiveness when combined with advanced embedding techniques. The results demonstrate that metadata-enriched approaches consistently outperform content-only baselines, with recursive chunking paired with TF-IDF weighted embeddings yielding an 82.5% precision rate compared to 73.3% for semantic content-only approaches. The naive chunking strategy with prefix-fusion achieved the highest Hit Rate@10 of 0.925. Our evaluation employs cross-encoder reranking for ground truth generation, enabling rigorous assessment via Hit Rate and Metadata Consistency metrics. These findings confirm that metadata enrichment enhances vector clustering quality while reducing retrieval latency, making it a key optimization for RAG systems across knowledge domains. This work offers practical insights for deploying high-performance, scalable document retrieval solutions in enterprise settings, demonstrating that metadata enrichment is a powerful approach for enhancing RAG effectiveness.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are increasingly vital for navigating the ever-expanding body of scientific literature, particularly in high-stakes domains such as chemistry. Despite the promise of RAG, foundational design choices -- such as how documents are segmented and represented -- remain underexplored in domain-specific contexts. This study presents the first large-scale, systematic evaluation of chunking strategies and embedding models tailored to chemistry-focused RAG systems. We investigate 25 chunking configurations across five method families and evaluate 48 embedding models on three chemistry-specific benchmarks, including the newly introduced QuestChemRetrieval dataset. Our results reveal that recursive token-based chunking (specifically R100-0) consistently outperforms other approaches, offering strong performance with minimal resource overhead. We also find that retrieval-optimized embeddings -- such as Nomic and Intfloat E5 variants -- substantially outperform domain-specialized models like SciBERT. By releasing our datasets, evaluation framework, and empirical benchmarks, we provide actionable guidelines for building effective and efficient chemistry-aware RAG systems.

The rapid growth of scientific literature has made it increasingly difficult for researchers to efficiently discover, evaluate, and synthesize relevant work. Recent advances in multi-agent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for understanding user intent and are being trained to utilize various tools. In this paper, we introduce Paper Circle, a multi-agent research discovery and analysis system designed to reduce the effort required to find, assess, organize, and understand academic literature. The system comprises two complementary pipelines: (1) a Discovery Pipeline that integrates offline and online retrieval from multiple sources, multi-criteria scoring, diversity-aware ranking, and structured outputs; and (2) an Analysis Pipeline that transforms individual papers into structured knowledge graphs with typed nodes such as concepts, methods, experiments, and figures, enabling graph-aware question answering and coverage verification. Both pipelines are implemented within a coder LLM-based multi-agent orchestration framework and produce fully reproducible, synchronized outputs including JSON, CSV, BibTeX, Markdown, and HTML at each agent step. This paper describes the system architecture, agent roles, retrieval and scoring methods, knowledge graph schema, and evaluation interfaces that together form the Paper Circle research workflow. We benchmark Paper Circle on both paper retrieval and paper review generation, reporting hit rate, MRR, and Recall at K. Results show consistent improvements with stronger agent models. We have publicly released the website at https://papercircle.vercel.app/ and the code at https://github.com/MAXNORM8650/papercircle.

Software documentation frequently becomes outdated or fails to exist entirely, yet developers need focused views of their codebase to understand complex systems. While automated reverse engineering tools can generate UML diagrams from code, they produce overwhelming detail without considering developer intent. We introduce query-driven UML diagram generation, where LLMs create diagrams that directly answer natural language questions about code. Unlike existing methods, our approach produces semantically focused diagrams containing only relevant elements with contextual descriptions. We fine-tune Qwen2.5-Coder-14B on a curated dataset of code files, developer queries, and corresponding diagram representations in a structured JSON format, evaluating with both automatic detection of structural defects and human assessment of semantic relevance. Results demonstrate that fine-tuning on a modest amount of manually corrected data yields dramatic improvements: our best model achieves the highest F1 scores while reducing defect rates below state-of-the-art LLMs, generating diagrams that are both structurally sound and semantically faithful to developer queries. Thus, we establish the feasibility of using LLMs for scalable contextual, on-demand documentation generation. We make our code and dataset publicly available at https://github.com/i-need-a-pencil/query2diagram.

Text-to-SQL has recently achieved impressive progress, yet remains difficult to apply effectively in real-world scenarios. This gap stems from the reliance on single static workflows, fundamentally limiting scalability to out-of-distribution and long-tail scenarios. Instead of requiring users to select suitable methods through extensive experimentation, we attempt to enable systems to adaptively construct workflows at inference time. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we demonstrate that optimal dynamic policies consistently outperform the best static workflow, with performance gains fundamentally driven by heterogeneity across candidate workflows. Motivated by this, we propose SquRL, a reinforcement learning framework that enhances LLMs' reasoning capability in adaptive workflow construction. We design a rule-based reward function and introduce two effective training mechanisms: dynamic actor masking to encourage broader exploration, and pseudo rewards to improve training efficiency. Experiments on widely-used Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrate that dynamic workflow construction consistently outperforms the best static workflow methods, with especially pronounced gains on complex and out-of-distribution queries. The codes are available at https://github.com/Satissss/SquRL

At present, executable visual workflows have emerged as a mainstream paradigm in real-world industrial deployments, offering strong reliability and controllability. However, in current practice, such workflows are almost entirely constructed through manual engineering: developers must carefully design workflows, write prompts for each step, and repeatedly revise the logic as requirements evolve-making development costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. To study whether large language models can automate this multi-round interaction process, we introduce Chat2Workflow, a benchmark for generating executable visual workflows directly from natural language, and propose a robust agentic framework to mitigate recurrent execution errors. Chat2Workflow is built from a large collection of real-world business workflows, with each instance designed so that the generated workflow can be transformed and directly deployed to practical workflow platforms such as Dify and Coze. Experimental results show that while state-of-the-art language models can often capture high-level intent, they struggle to generate correct, stable, and executable workflows, especially under complex or changing requirements. Although our agentic framework yields up to 5.34% resolve rate gains, the remaining real-world gap positions Chat2Workflow as a foundation for advancing industrial-grade automation. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/Chat2Workflow.

With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), rich document analysis technologies for applications like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and visual RAG are gaining significant attention. Recent research indicates that using VLMs can achieve better RAG performance, but processing rich documents still remains a challenge since a single page contains large amounts of information. In this paper, we present SCAN (SemantiC Document Layout ANalysis), a novel approach enhancing both textual and visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems working with visually rich documents. It is a VLM-friendly approach that identifies document components with appropriate semantic granularity, balancing context preservation with processing efficiency. SCAN uses a coarse-grained semantic approach that divides documents into coherent regions covering continuous components. We trained the SCAN model by fine-tuning object detection models with sophisticated annotation datasets. Our experimental results across English and Japanese datasets demonstrate that applying SCAN improves end-to-end textual RAG performance by up to 9.0\% and visual RAG performance by up to 6.4\%, outperforming conventional approaches and even commercial document processing solutions.

Research dissemination, turning a paper into a poster, a talk video, and a blog post, is still a manual last mile. Prior automation treats each artifact in isolation that each re-extract the paper from scratch, usually ship one-way renders the author cannot reopen in PowerPoint or Word, and gates quality on soft VLM-preference scores that plateau while load-bearing sections still read as empty. We argue this last mile is best built as a composition of skills: thin agent-readable contracts that share one upstream extractor and wrap deterministic primitives in a measured-fill loop whose exits are hard pass/fail render gates. We instantiate this as ResearchStudio-Reel, five Claude Code and Codex skills organized into one shared extractor (Paper2Assets), three editable generators (Paper2Poster, Paper2Video, Paper2Blog), and one interactive convergence layer (Paper2Reel). Paper2Assets extracts each paper once into a shared bundle that can be reused by every downstream skill; The three generators produce a print-ready poster, a synchronized talk video, and a bilingual blog that stay factually consistent and round-trip through PowerPoint or Word; Paper2Reel then binds all three into a self-contained HTML viewer whose section-level clicks jump the video, slides, captions, and blog to matching content. On the Paper2Poster benchmark, our posters lead every aesthetic and information sub-criterion against both prior automated systems and single-shot frontier LLMs, surpassing the authors' own on aesthetics under two held-out VLM judges and winning overall on 84% to 93% of papers; capability audits further show that, by uniquely pairing narration-aligned on-slide highlights with a bilingual blog gated by layout-aware DOCX repair, ResearchStudio-Reel is the only pipeline to ship all three editable artifacts. Project is available at https://aka.ms/ResearchStudio

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with tools are emerging as autonomous agents capable of using Web engine, APIs, and code to solve complex, long-horizon tasks. Current tool-using benchmarks for information seeking on academic graphs rely on synthetic templates, simplified solution spaces, or narrow tasks such as paper-centric tasks, leaving key challenges underexplored - realistic user intent, complex multi-step API planning, rich parameter filling for APIs, grounded answers with references, and comprehensive evaluation of both the process and the outcome. We introduce AISE-Bench, a real-world, full-cycle annotated benchmark for information seeking on academic knowledge graphs. AISE-Bench release contains 1,133 QA pairs, including query taxonomies, full API execution trajectories, validated parameters, and source-grounded answers with reference links. To support high-quality annotation, we design a customized agent workflow to enable annotators to plan, execute, and revise complex API workflows efficiently. We develop a comprehensive evaluation protocol measuring answer quality, reference grounding, API-planning correctness, and execution success. Among the 14 evaluated methods, even the strongest model (PLAY2PROMPT with Gemini-3-Pro) achieves only moderate performance and often struggles with API planning and execution. AISE-Bench establishes a challenging new testbed for quantitatively evaluating and improving the stepwise correctness, grounded summarization, and traceable reasoning of multi-step API-using LLM agents. Our code and data are available at https://aise-bench.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to data-intensive workflows, from database querying to developer observability. Yet the effectiveness of these systems is constrained by the volume, verbosity, and noise of real-world text-rich data such as logs, telemetry, and monitoring streams. Feeding such data directly into LLMs is costly, environmentally unsustainable, and often misaligned with task objectives. Parallel efforts in LLM efficiency have focused on model- or architecture-level optimizations, but the challenge of reducing upstream input verbosity remains underexplored. In this paper, we argue for treating the token budget of an LLM as an attention budget and elevating task-aware text reduction as a first-class design principle for language -- data systems. We position input-side reduction not as compression, but as attention allocation: prioritizing information most relevant to downstream tasks. We outline open research challenges for building benchmarks, designing adaptive reduction pipelines, and integrating token-budget--aware preprocessing into database and retrieval systems. Our vision is to channel scarce attention resources toward meaningful signals in noisy, data-intensive workflows, enabling scalable, accurate, and sustainable LLM--data integration.

The integration of artificial intelligence into journalistic practices represents a transformative shift in how news is gathered, analyzed, and disseminated. Large language models (LLMs), particularly those with agentic capabilities, offer unprecedented opportunities for enhancing journalistic workflows while simultaneously presenting complex challenges for newsroom integration. This research explores how agentic LLMs can support journalists' workflows, based on insights from journalist interviews and from the development of an LLM-based automation tool performing information filtering, summarization, and reporting. The paper details automated aggregation and summarization systems for journalists, presents a technical overview and evaluation of a user-centric LLM-driven reporting system (TeleFlash), and discusses both addressed and unmet journalist needs, with an outlook on future directions for AI-driven tools in journalism.

This paper introduces the Opus Workflow Evaluation Framework, a probabilistic-normative formulation for quantifying Workflow quality and efficiency. It integrates notions of correctness, reliability, and cost into a coherent mathematical model that enables direct comparison, scoring, and optimization of Workflows. The framework combines the Opus Workflow Reward, a probabilistic function estimating expected performance through success likelihood, resource usage, and output gain, with the Opus Workflow Normative Penalties, a set of measurable functions capturing structural and informational quality across Cohesion, Coupling, Observability, and Information Hygiene. It supports automated Workflow assessment, ranking, and optimization within modern automation systems such as Opus and can be integrated into Reinforcement Learning loops to guide Workflow discovery and refinement. In this paper, we introduce the Opus Workflow Reward model that formalizes Workflow success as a probabilistic expectation over costs and outcomes. We define measurable Opus Workflow Normative Penalties capturing structural, semantic, and signal-related properties of Workflows. Finally, we propose a unified optimization formulation for identifying and ranking optimal Workflows under joint Reward-Penalty trade-offs.

Business process automation (BPA) that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert natural language (NL) instructions into structured business process artifacts is becoming a hot research topic. This paper makes two technical contributions -- (i) FLOW-BENCH, a high quality dataset of paired natural language instructions and structured business process definitions to evaluate NL-based BPA tools, and support bourgeoning research in this area, and (ii) FLOW-GEN, our approach to utilize LLMs to translate natural language into an intermediate representation with Python syntax that facilitates final conversion into widely adopted business process definition languages, such as BPMN and DMN. We bootstrap FLOW-BENCH by demonstrating how it can be used to evaluate the components of FLOW-GEN across eight LLMs of varying sizes. We hope that FLOW-GEN and FLOW-BENCH catalyze further research in BPA making it more accessible to novice and expert users.

Scientific documents record research findings and valuable human knowledge, comprising a vast corpus of high-quality data. Leveraging multi-modality data extracted from these documents and assessing large models' abilities to handle scientific document-oriented tasks is therefore meaningful. Despite promising advancements, large models still perform poorly on multi-page scientific document extraction and understanding tasks, and their capacity to process within-document data formats such as charts and equations remains under-explored. To address these issues, we present DocGenome, a structured document benchmark constructed by annotating 500K scientific documents from 153 disciplines in the arXiv open-access community, using our custom auto-labeling pipeline. DocGenome features four key characteristics: 1) Completeness: It is the first dataset to structure data from all modalities including 13 layout attributes along with their LaTeX source codes. 2) Logicality: It provides 6 logical relationships between different entities within each scientific document. 3) Diversity: It covers various document-oriented tasks, including document classification, visual grounding, document layout detection, document transformation, open-ended single-page QA and multi-page QA. 4) Correctness: It undergoes rigorous quality control checks conducted by a specialized team. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of DocGenome and objectively evaluate the performance of large models on our benchmark.

As software engineering moves toward SE3.0, AI agents are increasingly used to carry out development tasks and contribute changes to software projects. It is therefore important to understand the extent of these contributions and how human developers review and intervene, since these factors shape the risks of delegating work to AI agents. While recent studies have examined how AI agents support software development tasks (e.g., code generation, issue resolution, and PR automation), their role in documentation tasks remains underexplored-even though documentation is widely consumed and shapes how developers understand and use software. Using the AIDev, we analyze 1,997 documentation-related pull requests (PRs) authored by AI agents and human developers, where documentation PRs are those that create or modify project documentation artifacts. We find that AI agents submit substantially more documentation-related PRs than humans in the studied repositories. We further observe that agent-authored documentation edits are typically integrated with little follow-up modification from humans, raising concerns about review practices and the reliability of agent-generated documentation. Overall, while AI agents already contribute substantially to documentation workflows, our results suggest concerns for emerging challenges for documentation quality assurance and human-AI collaboration in SE3.0.

We present SymbioticRAG, a novel framework that fundamentally reimagines Retrieval-Augmented Generation~(RAG) systems by establishing a bidirectional learning relationship between humans and machines. Our approach addresses two critical challenges in current RAG systems: the inherently human-centered nature of relevance determination and users' progression from "unconscious incompetence" in query formulation. SymbioticRAG introduces a two-tier solution where Level 1 enables direct human curation of retrieved content through interactive source document exploration, while Level 2 aims to build personalized retrieval models based on captured user interactions. We implement Level 1 through three key components: (1)~a comprehensive document processing pipeline with specialized models for layout detection, OCR, and extraction of tables, formulas, and figures; (2)~an extensible retriever module supporting multiple retrieval strategies; and (3)~an interactive interface that facilitates both user engagement and interaction data logging. We experiment Level 2 implementation via a retriever strategy incorporated LLM summarized user intention from user interaction logs. To maintain high-quality data preparation, we develop a human-on-the-loop validation interface that improves pipeline output while advancing research in specialized extraction tasks. Evaluation across three scenarios (literature review, geological exploration, and education) demonstrates significant improvements in retrieval relevance and user satisfaction compared to traditional RAG approaches. To facilitate broader research and further advancement of SymbioticRAG Level 2 implementation, we will make our system openly accessible to the research community.

Systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses are essential for synthesizing research insights, but they remain time-intensive and labor-intensive due to the iterative processes of screening, evaluation, and data extraction. This paper introduces and evaluates LatteReview, a Python-based framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems to automate key elements of the systematic review process. Designed to streamline workflows while maintaining rigor, LatteReview utilizes modular agents for tasks such as title and abstract screening, relevance scoring, and structured data extraction. These agents operate within orchestrated workflows, supporting sequential and parallel review rounds, dynamic decision-making, and iterative refinement based on user feedback. LatteReview's architecture integrates LLM providers, enabling compatibility with both cloud-based and locally hosted models. The framework supports features such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for incorporating external context, multimodal reviews, Pydantic-based validation for structured inputs and outputs, and asynchronous programming for handling large-scale datasets. The framework is available on the GitHub repository, with detailed documentation and an installable package.

AI-generated content has evolved from monolithic models to modular workflows, particularly on platforms like ComfyUI, enabling customization in creative pipelines. However, crafting effective workflows requires great expertise to orchestrate numerous specialized components, presenting a steep learning curve for users. To address this challenge, we introduce ComfyUI-R1, the first large reasoning model for automated workflow generation. Starting with our curated dataset of 4K workflows, we construct long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning data, including node selection, workflow planning, and code-level workflow representation. ComfyUI-R1 is trained through a two-stage framework: (1) CoT fine-tuning for cold start, adapting models to the ComfyUI domain; (2) reinforcement learning for incentivizing reasoning capability, guided by a fine-grained rule-metric hybrid reward, ensuring format validity, structural integrity, and node-level fidelity. Experiments show that our 7B-parameter model achieves a 97\% format validity rate, along with high pass rate, node-level and graph-level F1 scores, significantly surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods that employ leading closed-source models such as GPT-4o and Claude series. Further analysis highlights the critical role of the reasoning process and the advantage of transforming workflows into code. Qualitative comparison reveals our strength in synthesizing intricate workflows with diverse nodes, underscoring the potential of long CoT reasoning in AI art creation.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, particularly in specialized domains. While many RAG approaches have been proposed to enhance large language models through query-dependent retrievals, these approaches still suffer from their complex implementation and prolonged response times. Typically, a RAG workflow involves multiple processing steps, each of which can be executed in various ways. Here, we investigate existing RAG approaches and their potential combinations to identify optimal RAG practices. Through extensive experiments, we suggest several strategies for deploying RAG that balance both performance and efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate that multimodal retrieval techniques can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities about visual inputs and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a "retrieval as generation" strategy.

Paper search is an important activity for researchers, typically involving using a query with description of a topic to find relevant papers. As research deepens, paper search requirements may become more flexible, sometimes involving specific details such as module configuration rather than being limited to coarse-grained topics. However, previous paper search systems are unable to meet these flexible-grained requirements, as these systems mainly collect paper abstracts to construct index of corpus, which lack detailed information to support retrieval by finer-grained queries. In this work, we propose PaperRegister, consisted of offline hierarchical indexing and online adaptive retrieval, transforming traditional abstract-based index into hierarchical index tree for paper search, thereby supporting queries at flexible granularity. Experiments on paper search tasks across a range of granularity demonstrate that PaperRegister achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and particularly excels in fine-grained scenarios, highlighting the good potential as an effective solution for flexible-grained paper search in real-world applications. Code for this work is in https://github.com/Li-Z-Q/PaperRegister.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness in code generation tasks. To enable LLMs to address more complex coding challenges, existing research has focused on crafting multi-agent systems with agentic workflows, where complex coding tasks are decomposed into sub-tasks, assigned to specialized agents. Despite their effectiveness, current approaches heavily rely on hand-crafted agentic workflows, with both agent topologies and prompts manually designed, which limits their ability to automatically adapt to different types of coding problems. To address these limitations and enable automated workflow design, we propose Self-Evolving Workflow (SEW), a novel self-evolving framework that automatically generates and optimises multi-agent workflows. Extensive experiments on three coding benchmark datasets, including the challenging LiveCodeBench, demonstrate that our SEW can automatically design agentic workflows and optimise them through self-evolution, bringing up to 33\% improvement on LiveCodeBench compared to using the backbone LLM only. Furthermore, by investigating different representation schemes of workflow, we provide insights into the optimal way to encode workflow information with text.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous coding agents and have achieved remarkably strong performance on software engineering benchmarks. However, it is unclear whether such success transfers to computational scientific workflows, where tasks require not only strong coding ability, but also the ability to navigate complex, domain-specific procedures and to interpret results in the context of scientific claims. To address this question, we present AutoMat, a benchmark for evaluating LLM-based agents' ability to reproduce claims from computational materials science. AutoMat poses three interrelated challenges: recovering underspecified computational procedures, navigating specialized toolchains, and determining whether the resulting evidence supports a claim. By working closely with subject matter experts, we curate a set of claims from real materials science papers to test whether coding agents can recover and execute the end-to-end workflow needed to support (or undermine) such claims. We then evaluate multiple representative coding agent settings across several foundation models. Our results show that current LLM-based agents obtain low overall success rates on AutoMat, with the best-performing setting achieving a success rate of only 54.1%. Error analysis further reveals that agents perform worst when workflows must be reconstructed from paper text alone and that they fail primarily due to incomplete procedures, methodological deviations, and execution fragility. Taken together, these findings position AutoMat as both a benchmark for computational scientific reproducibility and a tool for diagnosing the current limitations of agentic systems in AI-for-science settings.

Document parsing aims to transform unstructured PDF images into semi-structured data, facilitating the digitization and utilization of information in diverse domains. While vision language models (VLMs) have significantly advanced this task, achieving reliable, high-quality parsing in real-world scenarios remains challenging. Common practice often selects the top-performing model on standard benchmarks. However, these benchmarks may carry dataset-specific biases, leading to inconsistent model rankings and limited correlation with real-world performance. Moreover, benchmark metrics typically provide only overall scores, which can obscure distinct error patterns in output. This raises a key challenge: how can we reliably and comprehensively assess document parsing quality in the wild? We address this problem with DOCR-Inspector, which formalizes document parsing assessment as fine-grained error detection and analysis. Leveraging VLM-as-a-Judge, DOCR-Inspector analyzes a document image and its parsed output, identifies all errors, assigns them to one of 28 predefined types, and produces a comprehensive quality assessment. To enable this capability, we construct DOCRcase-200K for training and propose the Chain-of-Checklist reasoning paradigm to enable the hierarchical structure of parsing quality assessment. For empirical validation, we introduce DOCRcaseBench, a set of 882 real-world document parsing cases with manual annotations. On this benchmark, DOCR-Inspector-7B outperforms commercial models like Gemini 2.5 Pro, as well as leading open-source models. Further experiments demonstrate that its quality assessments provide valuable guidance for parsing results refinement, making DOCR-Inspector both a practical evaluator and a driver for advancing document parsing systems at scale. Model and code are released at: https://github.com/ZZZZZQT/DOCR-Inspector.

The Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building - all proceeding concurrently in mutually-reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from about two hundred users, totaling over 280 terabytes of web archives.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 promise automation with better results and less programming, opening up new opportunities for text analysis in political science. In this study, we evaluate LLMs on three original coding tasks involving typical complexities encountered in political science settings: a non-English language, legal and political jargon, and complex labels based on abstract constructs. Along the paper, we propose a practical workflow to optimize the choice of the model and the prompt. We find that the best prompting strategy consists of providing the LLMs with a detailed codebook, as the one provided to human coders. In this setting, an LLM can be as good as or possibly better than a human annotator while being much faster, considerably cheaper, and much easier to scale to large amounts of text. We also provide a comparison of GPT and popular open-source LLMs, discussing the trade-offs in the model's choice. Our software allows LLMs to be easily used as annotators and is publicly available: https://github.com/lorelupo/pappa.

Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 210 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engineering (DE) tasks require repository-level engineering on industrial schemas, including designing and building multi-stage SQL pipelines from scratch and evolving existing systems under evolving requirements. Data analysis (DA) tasks pose open-ended business problems that demand strategic planning, exploratory analysis through iterative coding, interpretation of intermediate results, and the synthesis of actionable recommendations. Engineering tasks are scored through execution-based, multi-metric evaluation. Open-ended tasks are assessed by a reliable, experimentally validated LLM-judge, which is guided by hierarchical, meticulously crafted rubrics. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents falter on DAComp. Performance on DE tasks is particularly low, with success rates under 20%, exposing a critical bottleneck in holistic pipeline orchestration, not merely code generation. Scores on DA tasks also average below 40%, highlighting profound deficiencies in open-ended reasoning and demonstrating that engineering and analysis are distinct capabilities. By clearly diagnosing these limitations, DAComp provides a rigorous and realistic testbed to drive the development of truly capable autonomous data agents for enterprise settings. Our data and code are available at https://da-comp.github.io

State-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs have progressed from struggling on proof-based Olympiad problems to solving most of the IMO 2025 problems, with leading systems reportedly handling 5 of 6 problems. Given this progress, we assess how well these models can grade proofs: detecting errors, judging their severity, and assigning fair scores beyond binary correctness. We study proof-analysis capabilities using a corpus of 90 Gemini 2.5 Pro-generated solutions that we grade on a 1-4 scale with detailed error annotations, and on MathArena solution sets for IMO/USAMO 2025 scored on a 0-7 scale. Our analysis shows that models can reliably flag incorrect (including subtly incorrect) solutions but exhibit calibration gaps in how partial credit is assigned. To address this, we introduce agentic workflows that extract and analyze reference solutions and automatically derive problem-specific rubrics for a multi-step grading process. We instantiate and compare different design choices for the grading workflows, and evaluate their trade-offs. Across our annotated corpus and MathArena, our proposed workflows achieve higher agreement with human grades and more consistent handling of partial credit across metrics. We release all code, data, and prompts/logs to facilitate future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and other foundation models are increasingly used as the core of AI agents. In agentic workflows, these agents plan tasks, interact with humans and peers, and influence scientific outcomes across federated and heterogeneous environments. However, agents can hallucinate or reason incorrectly, propagating errors when one agent's output becomes another's input. Thus, assuring that agents' actions are transparent, traceable, reproducible, and reliable is critical to assess hallucination risks and mitigate their workflow impacts. While provenance techniques have long supported these principles, existing methods fail to capture and relate agent-centric metadata such as prompts, responses, and decisions with the broader workflow context and downstream outcomes. In this paper, we introduce PROV-AGENT, a provenance model that extends W3C PROV and leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and data observability to integrate agent interactions into end-to-end workflow provenance. Our contributions include: (1) a provenance model tailored for agentic workflows, (2) a near real-time, open-source system for capturing agentic provenance, and (3) a cross-facility evaluation spanning edge, cloud, and HPC environments, demonstrating support for critical provenance queries and agent reliability analysis.

Document intelligence requires accurate text extraction and reliable reasoning over document content. We introduce DISCO, a Document Intelligence Suite for COmparative Evaluation, that evaluates optical character recognition (OCR) pipelines and vision-language models (VLMs) separately on parsing and question answering across diverse document types, including handwritten text, multilingual scripts, medical forms, infographics, and multi-page documents. Our evaluation shows that performance varies substantially across tasks and document characteristics, underscoring the need for complexity-aware approach selection. OCR pipelines are generally more reliable for handwriting and for long or multi-page documents, where explicit text grounding supports text-heavy reasoning, while VLMs perform better on multilingual text and visually rich layouts. Task-aware prompting yields mixed effects, improving performance on some document types while degrading it on others. These findings provide empirical guidance for selecting document processing strategies based on document structure and reasoning demands.

Scientific discovery workflows usually contain and rely heavily on lab notes, where researchers record observations, interpret uncertain results, and plan follow-up experiments. Such informative lab notes preserve evolving scientific reasoning and author uncertainty, rather than polished final results exhibited in publications, providing a valuable opportunity for AI to engage in scientific exploration at a more comprehensive and deeper level. However, most prior work on scientific text focuses on papers, protocols, or structured databases, leaving informal laboratory notes underexplored as inputs to AI agents for science. This gap matters because lab notes often intermingle validated observations, tentative judgments, and possible experimental next steps within the same passage. If these signals are conflated, an AI agent may mistake uncertain scientific judgments for confirmed conclusions or executable actions. To this end, we present Notes2Skills, a two-stage framework for turning lab notebooks into verifiable skills for scientific AI agents while preserving the author's certainty. Across seven conditions and three wet-lab sessions, Notes2Skills is the only configuration that neither mistakes uncertain notes for firm instructions nor discards firm ones. We show that certainty preservation is the missing piece between lab notebooks and reliable agent skills, opening a path toward safer AI co-scientist systems.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are usually defined by the combination of a generator and a retrieval component that extracts textual context from a knowledge base to answer user queries. However, such basic implementations exhibit several limitations, including noisy or suboptimal retrieval, misuse of retrieval for out-of-scope queries, weak query-document matching, and variability or cost associated with the generator. These shortcomings have motivated the development of "Enhanced" RAG, where dedicated modules are introduced to address specific weaknesses in the workflow. More recently, the growing self-reflective capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled a new paradigm, often referred to as "Agentic" RAG. In this approach, an LLM orchestrates the entire process, deciding which actions to perform, when to perform them, and whether to iterate. Despite the rapid adoption of both paradigms, it remains unclear which approach is preferable under which conditions. In this work, we conduct an empirically driven evaluation of "Enhanced" and "Agentic" RAG across multiple scenarios and dimensions. Our results provide practical insights into the trade-offs between the two paradigms, offering guidance on selecting the most effective RAG design for real-world applications, considering both performance and costs.

Visual long-document understanding is critical for enterprise, legal, and scientific applications, yet the best performing open recipes have not explored reasoning, a capability which has driven leaps in math and code performance. We introduce a synthetic data pipeline for reasoning in long-document understanding that generates thinking traces by scoring each page for question relevance, extracting textual evidence and ordering it from most to least relevant. We apply SFT to the resulting traces within <think> tags, gated by a <cot> control token, and the resulting reasoning capability is internalized via low-strength model merging. We study Qwen3 VL 32B and Mistral Small 3.1 24B. With Qwen3 VL, we achieve 58.3 on MMLongBenchDoc, surpassing the 7times larger Qwen3 VL 235B A22B (57.0). With Mistral, we show that synthetic reasoning outperforms distillation from the Thinking version's traces by 3.8 points on MMLBD-C, and internalized reasoning exhibits 12.4times fewer mean output tokens compared to explicit reasoning. We release our pipeline for reproducibility and further exploration.