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Main Authors: Li, Ruizhe, Du, Mingxuan, Xu, Benfeng, Zhu, Chiwei, Wang, Xiaorui, Mao, Zhendong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08536
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author Li, Ruizhe
Du, Mingxuan
Xu, Benfeng
Zhu, Chiwei
Wang, Xiaorui
Mao, Zhendong
author_facet Li, Ruizhe
Du, Mingxuan
Xu, Benfeng
Zhu, Chiwei
Wang, Xiaorui
Mao, Zhendong
contents Deep Research Systems (DRS) aim to help users search the web, synthesize information, and deliver comprehensive investigative reports. However, how to rigorously evaluate these systems remains under-explored. Existing deep-research benchmarks often fall into two failure modes. Some do not adequately test a system's ability to analyze evidence and write coherent reports. Others rely on evaluation criteria that are either overly coarse or directly defined by LLMs (or both), leading to scores that can be biased relative to human experts and are hard to verify or interpret. To address these issues, we introduce Deep Research Bench II, a new benchmark for evaluating DRS-generated reports. It contains 132 grounded research tasks across 22 domains; for each task, a system must produce a long-form research report that is evaluated by a set of 9430 fine-grained binary rubrics in total, covering three dimensions: information recall, analysis, and presentation. All rubrics are derived from carefully selected expert-written investigative articles and are constructed through a four-stage LLM+human pipeline that combines automatic extraction with over 400 human-hours of expert review, ensuring that the criteria are atomic, verifiable, and aligned with human expert judgment. We evaluate several state-of-the-art deep-research systems on Deep Research Bench II and find that even the strongest models satisfy fewer than 50% of the rubrics, revealing a substantial gap between current DRSs and human experts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_08536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeepResearch Bench II: Diagnosing Deep Research Agents via Rubrics from Expert Report
Li, Ruizhe
Du, Mingxuan
Xu, Benfeng
Zhu, Chiwei
Wang, Xiaorui
Mao, Zhendong
Computation and Language
Deep Research Systems (DRS) aim to help users search the web, synthesize information, and deliver comprehensive investigative reports. However, how to rigorously evaluate these systems remains under-explored. Existing deep-research benchmarks often fall into two failure modes. Some do not adequately test a system's ability to analyze evidence and write coherent reports. Others rely on evaluation criteria that are either overly coarse or directly defined by LLMs (or both), leading to scores that can be biased relative to human experts and are hard to verify or interpret. To address these issues, we introduce Deep Research Bench II, a new benchmark for evaluating DRS-generated reports. It contains 132 grounded research tasks across 22 domains; for each task, a system must produce a long-form research report that is evaluated by a set of 9430 fine-grained binary rubrics in total, covering three dimensions: information recall, analysis, and presentation. All rubrics are derived from carefully selected expert-written investigative articles and are constructed through a four-stage LLM+human pipeline that combines automatic extraction with over 400 human-hours of expert review, ensuring that the criteria are atomic, verifiable, and aligned with human expert judgment. We evaluate several state-of-the-art deep-research systems on Deep Research Bench II and find that even the strongest models satisfy fewer than 50% of the rubrics, revealing a substantial gap between current DRSs and human experts.
title DeepResearch Bench II: Diagnosing Deep Research Agents via Rubrics from Expert Report
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08536