Paper Circle: An Open-source Multi-agent Research Discovery and Analysis Framework

Komal Kumar, Aman Chadha, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Hisham Cholakkal


Abstract
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 (e.g., concepts, methods, experiments, and figures) and edges, 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 (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@K. Results show consistent improvements with stronger agent models. We have publicly released the website:https://papercircle.vercel.app/ and code: https://github.com/MAXNORM8650/papercircle.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1952
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
42170–42188
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1952/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Komal Kumar, Aman Chadha, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, and Hisham Cholakkal. 2026. Paper Circle: An Open-source Multi-agent Research Discovery and Analysis Framework. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 42170–42188, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Paper Circle: An Open-source Multi-agent Research Discovery and Analysis Framework (Kumar et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1952.pdf
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