Xiaojie Cai
2026
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts
Keyu Li | Junhao Shi | Yang Xiao | Mohan Jiang | Jie Sun | Yunze Wu | Dayuan Fu | Shijie Xia | Xiaojie Cai | Tianze Xu | Weiye Si | Wenjie Li | Dequan Wang | Pengfei Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Keyu Li | Junhao Shi | Yang Xiao | Mohan Jiang | Jie Sun | Yunze Wu | Dayuan Fu | Shijie Xia | Xiaojie Cai | Tianze Xu | Weiye Si | Wenjie Li | Dequan Wang | Pengfei Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) based autonomous agents demonstrate multifaceted capabilities to contribute substantially to economic production. However, existing benchmarks remain focused on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. Moreover, the reliance on human-in-the-loop feedback for realistic tasks creates a scalability bottleneck, hindering automated rollout collection and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgencyBench, a comprehensive benchmark derived from daily AI usage, evaluating 6 core agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios, comprising 138 tasks with specific queries, deliverables, and rubrics. These scenarios require an average of 90 tool calls, 1 million tokens, and hours of execution time to resolve. To enable automated evaluation, we employ a user simulation agent to provide iterative feedback, and a Docker sandbox to conduct visual and functional rubric-based assessment. Experiments reveal that closed-source models significantly outperform open-source models (48.4% vs 32.1%). Further analysis reveals significant disparities across models in resource efficiency, feedback-driven self-correction, and specific tool-use preferences.
2025
DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments
Yuxiang Zheng | Dayuan Fu | Xiangkun Hu | Xiaojie Cai | Lyumanshan Ye | Pengrui Lu | Pengfei Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuxiang Zheng | Dayuan Fu | Xiangkun Hu | Xiaojie Cai | Lyumanshan Ye | Pengrui Lu | Pengfei Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) with web search capabilities show significant potential for deep research, yet current methods—brittle prompt engineering or RAG-based reinforcement learning in controlled environments—fail to capture real-world complexities. In this paper, we introduce DeepResearcher, the first comprehensive framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents through scaling reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments with authentic web search interactions. Unlike RAG approaches reliant on fixed corpora, DeepResearcher trains agents to navigate the noisy, dynamic open web. We implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures and overcoming significant technical challenges. Extensive experiments on open-domain research tasks demonstrate that DeepResearcher achieves substantial improvements of up to 28.9 points over prompt engineering-based baselines and up to 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. Our qualitative analysis reveals emergent cognitive behaviors from end-to-end RL training, such as planning, cross-validation, self-reflection for research redirection, and maintain honesty when unable to find definitive answers. Our results highlight that end-to-end training in real-world web environments is fundamental for developing robust research capabilities aligned with real-world applications. The source codefor DeepResearcher is released at: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher.