WebWeaver: Structuring Web-Scale Evidence with Dynamic Outlines for Open-Ended Deep Research
Zijian Li, Xin Guan, Bo Zhang, Shen Huang, Houquan Zhou, Shaopeng Lai, Ming Yan, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jun Zhang, Jingren Zhou
Abstract
This paper tackles open-ended deep research (OEDR), a complex challenge where AI agents must synthesize vast web-scale information into insightful reports. Current approaches are plagued by dual-fold limitations: static research pipelines that decouple planning from evidence acquisition and monolithic generation paradigms that include redundant, irrelevant evidence, suffering from hallucination issues and low citation accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce WebWeaver, a novel dual-agent framework that emulates the human research process. The planner operates in a dynamic cycle, iteratively interleaving evidence acquisition with outline optimization to produce a comprehensive, citation-grounded outline linking to a memory bank of evidence. The writer then executes a hierarchical retrieval and writing process, composing the report section by section. By performing targeted retrieval of only the necessary evidence from the memory bank via citations for each part, it effectively mitigates long-context issues and citation hallucinations. Our framework establishes a new state-of-the-art across major OEDR benchmarks, including DeepResearch Bench, DeepConsult, and DeepResearchGym. These results validate our human-centric, iterative methodology, demonstrating that adaptive planning and focused synthesis are crucial for producing comprehensive, trusted, and well-structured reports.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext 1ed672df-fcb7-4822-9a45-ec52801b8166Cited by top-tier papers7
- Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics for Deep ResearchRulin Shao, Akari Asai, Shannon Shen, Hamish Ivison et al.ICML 2026 · 78 citations
- Doc-Researcher: A Unified System for Multimodal Document Parsing and Deep ResearchKuicai Dong, Shurui Huang, Fangda Ye, Wei Han et al.WWW 2026 · 4 citations
- WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation ModelsRui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang et al.ACL 2026 · 4 citations
- FS-Researcher: Test-Time Scaling for Long-Horizon Research Tasks with File-System-Based AgentsChiwei Zhu, Benfeng Xu, Mingxuan Du, Shaohan Wang et al.ACL 2026 · 2 citations
- Optimizing Retrieval for RAG via Reinforcement LearningJiawei Zhou, Lei ChenNeurIPS 2025 · 1 citation
Builds on10
- GAIA: a benchmark for General AI AssistantsGrégoire Mialon, Clémentine Fourrier, Thomas Wolf, Yann LeCun et al.ICLR 2024 · 716 citations
- DeepResearch Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Research AgentsMingxuan Du, Benfeng Xu, Chiwei Zhu, Licheng Zhang et al.ICLR 2026 · 250 citations
- WebShaper: Agentically Data Synthesizing via Information-Seeking FormalizationZhengwei Tao, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Pu Wu et al.ICLR 2026 · 115 citations
- Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and RevisionKevin Yang, Yuandong Tian, Nanyun Peng, Dan KleinEMNLP 2022 · 77 citations
- WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement LearningKuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Rui Ye et al.ICLR 2026 · 65 citations
Related papers
- A Tale of Two Graphs: Separating Knowledge Exploration from Outline Structure for Open-Ended Deep ResearchZhuofan Shi, Ming Ma, ZekunYao, Fangkai Yang et al.ICML 2026 · 1 citation
- WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research CapabilityXiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Guanting Dong, Hongjin Qian et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 354 citations
- IntentRL: Training Proactive User-intent Agents for Open-ended Deep Research via Reinforcement LearningHaohao Luo, Zexi Li, Yuexiang Xie, Wenhao Zhang et al.ICML 2026
- Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report RevisionBingsen Chen, Boyan Li, Ping Nie, Yuyu Zhang et al.ACL 2026 · 1 citation
- A Benchmark for Deep Information SynthesisDebjit Paul, Daniel Murphy, Milan Gritta, Ronald Cardenas et al.ICLR 2026 · 1 citation
