Evaluating Stochasticity in Deep Research Agents

Deep Research Agents (DRAs) are promising agentic systems that gather and synthesize information to support research across domains such as financial decision-making, medical analysis, and scientific discovery. Despite recent improvements in research quality (e.g., outcome accuracy when ground truth is available), DRA system design often overlooks a critical barrier to real-world deployment: stochasticity. Under identical queries, repeated executions of DRAs can exhibit substantial variability in terms of research outcome, findings, and citations. In this paper, we formalize the study of stochasticity in DRAs by modeling them as information acquisition Markov Decision Processes. We introduce an evaluation framework that quantifies variance in the system and identify three sources of it: information acquisition, information compression, and inference. Through controlled experiments, we investigate how stochasticity from these modules across different decision steps influences the variance of DRA outputs. Our results show that reducing stochasticity can improve research output quality, with inference and early-stage stochasticity contributing the most to DRA output variance. Based on these findings, we propose strategies for mitigating stochasticity while maintaining output quality via structured output and ensemble-based query generation. Our experiments on DeepSearchQA show that our proposed mitigation methods reduce average stochasticity by 22% while maintaining high research quality.

Balancing Faithfulness and Performance in Reasoning via Multi-Listener Soft Execution

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning sometimes fails to faithfully reflect the true computation of a large language model (LLM), hampering its utility in explaining how LLMs arrive at their answers. Moreover, optimizing for faithfulness and interpretability in reasoning often degrades task performance. To address this tradeoff and improve CoT faithfulness, we propose Reasoning Execution by Multiple Listeners (REMUL), a multi-party reinforcement learning approach. REMUL builds on the hypothesis that reasoning traces which other parties can follow will be more faithful. A speaker model generates a reasoning trace, which is truncated and passed to a pool of listener models who "execute" the trace, continuing the trace to an answer. Speakers are rewarded for producing reasoning that is clear to listeners, with additional correctness regularization via masked supervised finetuning to counter the tradeoff between faithfulness and performance. On multiple reasoning benchmarks (BIG-Bench Extra Hard, MuSR, ZebraLogicBench, and FOLIO), REMUL consistently and substantially improves three measures of faithfulness -- hint attribution, early answering area over the curve (AOC), and mistake injection AOC -- while also improving accuracy. Our analysis finds that these gains are robust across training domains, translate to legibility gains, and are associated with shorter and more direct CoTs.

Multimodal Fact-Level Attribution for Verifiable Reasoning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used for real-world tasks involving multi-step reasoning and long-form generation, where reliability requires grounding model outputs in heterogeneous input sources and verifying individual factual claims. However, existing multimodal grounding benchmarks and evaluation methods focus on simplified, observation-based scenarios or limited modalities and fail to assess attribution in complex multimodal reasoning. We introduce MuRGAt (Multimodal Reasoning with Grounded Attribution), a benchmark for evaluating fact-level multimodal attribution in settings that require reasoning beyond direct observation. Given inputs spanning video, audio, and other modalities, MuRGAt requires models to generate answers with explicit reasoning and precise citations, where each citation specifies both modality and temporal segments. To enable reliable assessment, we introduce an automatic evaluation framework that strongly correlates with human judgments. Benchmarking with human and automated scores reveals that even strong MLLMs frequently hallucinate citations despite correct reasoning. Moreover, we observe a key trade-off: increasing reasoning depth or enforcing structured grounding often degrades accuracy, highlighting a significant gap between internal reasoning and verifiable attribution.

Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Foundation models, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), Image Generative Models (i.e, Text-to-Image Models and Image-Editing Models), and Video Generative Models, have become essential tools with broad applications across various domains such as law, medicine, education, finance, science, and beyond. As these models see increasing real-world deployment, ensuring their reliability and responsibility has become critical for academia, industry, and government. This survey addresses the reliable and responsible development of foundation models. We explore critical issues, including bias and fairness, security and privacy, uncertainty, explainability, and distribution shift. Our research also covers model limitations, such as hallucinations, as well as methods like alignment and Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) detection. For each area, we review the current state of the field and outline concrete future research directions. Additionally, we discuss the intersections between these areas, highlighting their connections and shared challenges. We hope our survey fosters the development of foundation models that are not only powerful but also ethical, trustworthy, reliable, and socially responsible.

Conflict-Resolving and Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Generalized Knowledge Editing with Multiple Updates

Large language models (LLMs) rely on internal knowledge to solve many downstream tasks, making it crucial to keep them up to date. Since full retraining is expensive, prior work has explored efficient alternatives such as model editing and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. However, these approaches often break down in practice due to poor generalization across inputs, limited stability, and knowledge conflict. To address these limitations, we propose the CoRSA (Conflict-Resolving and Sharpness-Aware Minimization) training framework, a parameter-efficient, holistic approach for knowledge editing with multiple updates. CoRSA tackles multiple challenges simultaneously: it improves generalization to different input forms and enhances stability across multiple updates by minimizing loss curvature, and resolves conflicts by maximizing the margin between new and prior knowledge. Across three widely used fact editing benchmarks, CoRSA achieves significant gains in generalization, outperforming baselines with average absolute improvements of 12.42% over LoRA and 10% over model editing methods. With multiple updates, it maintains high update efficacy while reducing catastrophic forgetting by 27.82% compared to LoRA. CoRSA also generalizes to the code domain, outperforming the strongest baseline by 5.48% Pass@5 in update efficacy.

Routing with Generated Data: Annotation-Free LLM Skill Estimation and Expert Selection

Large Language Model (LLM) routers dynamically select optimal models for given inputs. Existing approaches typically assume access to ground-truth labeled data, which is often unavailable in practice, especially when user request distributions are heterogeneous and unknown. We introduce Routing with Generated Data (RGD), a challenging setting in which routers are trained exclusively on generated queries and answers produced from high-level task descriptions by generator LLMs. We evaluate query-answer routers (using both queries and labels) and query-only routers across four diverse benchmarks and 12 models, finding that query-answer routers degrade faster than query-only routers as generator quality decreases. Our analysis reveals two crucial characteristics of effective generators: they must accurately respond to their own questions, and their questions must produce sufficient performance differentiation among the model pool. We then show how filtering for these characteristics can improve the quality of generated data. We further propose CASCAL, a novel query-only router that estimates model correctness through consensus voting and identifies model-specific skill niches via hierarchical clustering. CASCAL is substantially more robust to generator quality, outperforming the best query-answer router by 4.6% absolute accuracy when trained on weak generator data.

Gistify! Codebase-Level Understanding via Runtime Execution

As coding agents are increasingly deployed in large codebases, the need to automatically design challenging, codebase-level evaluation is central. We propose Gistify, a task where a coding LLM must create a single, minimal, self-contained file that can reproduce a specific functionality of a codebase. The coding LLM is given full access to a codebase along with a specific entrypoint (e.g., a python command), and the generated file must replicate the output of the same command ran under the full codebase, while containing only the essential components necessary to execute the provided command. Success on Gistify requires both structural understanding of the codebase, accurate modeling of its execution flow as well as the ability to produce potentially large code patches. Our findings show that current state-of-the-art models struggle to reliably solve Gistify tasks, especially ones with long executions traces.

PoSh: Using Scene Graphs To Guide LLMs-as-a-Judge For Detailed Image Descriptions

While vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced into detailed image description, evaluation remains a challenge. Standard metrics (e.g. CIDEr, SPICE) were designed for short texts and tuned to recognize errors that are now uncommon, such as object misidentification. In contrast, long texts require sensitivity to attribute and relation attachments and scores that localize errors to particular text spans. In this work, we introduce PoSh, a metric for detailed image description that uses scene graphs as structured rubrics to guide LLMs-as-a-Judge, producing aggregate scores grounded in fine-grained errors (e.g. mistakes in compositional understanding). PoSh is replicable, interpretable and a better proxy for human raters than existing metrics (including GPT4o-as-a-Judge). To validate PoSh, we introduce a challenging new dataset, DOCENT. This novel benchmark contains artwork, paired with expert-written references, and model-generated descriptions, augmented with granular and coarse judgments of their quality from art history students. Thus, DOCENT enables evaluating both detailed image description metrics and detailed image description itself in a challenging new domain. We show that PoSh achieves stronger correlations (+0.05 Spearman $\rho$) with the human judgments in DOCENT than the best open-weight alternatives, is robust to image type (using CapArena, an existing dataset of web imagery) and is a capable reward function, outperforming standard supervised fine-tuning. Then, using PoSh, we characterize the performance of open and closed models in describing the paintings, sketches and statues in DOCENT and find that foundation models struggle to achieve full, error-free coverage of images with rich scene dynamics, establishing a demanding new task to gauge VLM progress. Through both PoSh and DOCENT, we hope to enable advances in important areas such as assistive text generation.

Think Right: Learning to Mitigate Under-Over Thinking via Adaptive, Attentive Compression

Recent thinking models solve complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute, but this scaling must be allocated in line with task difficulty. On one hand, short reasoning (underthinking) leads to errors on harder problems that require extended reasoning steps; but, excessively long reasoning (overthinking) can be token-inefficient, generating unnecessary steps even after reaching a correct intermediate solution. We refer to this as under-adaptivity, where the model fails to modulate its response length appropriately given problems of varying difficulty. To address under-adaptivity and strike a balance between under- and overthinking, we propose TRAAC (Think Right with Adaptive, Attentive Compression), an online post-training RL method that leverages the model's self-attention over a long reasoning trajectory to identify important steps and prune redundant ones. TRAAC also estimates difficulty and incorporates it into training rewards, thereby learning to allocate reasoning budget commensurate with example difficulty. Our approach improves accuracy, reduces reasoning steps, and enables adaptive thinking compared to base models and other RL baselines. Across a variety of tasks (AIME, AMC, GPQA-D, BBEH), TRAAC (Qwen3-4B) achieves an average absolute accuracy gain of 8.4% with a relative reduction in reasoning length of 36.8% compared to the base model, and a 7.9% accuracy gain paired with a 29.4% length drop compared to the best RL baseline. TRAAC also shows strong generalization: although our models are trained on math datasets, they show accuracy and efficiency gains on out-of-distribution non-math datasets like GPQA-D, BBEH, and OptimalThinkingBench. Our analysis further verifies that TRAAC provides fine-grained adjustments to thinking budget based on difficulty and that a combination of task-difficulty calibration and attention-based compression yields gains across diverse tasks.

Language Models Identify Ambiguities and Exploit Loopholes

Studying the responses of large language models (LLMs) to loopholes presents a two-fold opportunity. First, it affords us a lens through which to examine ambiguity and pragmatics in LLMs, since exploiting a loophole requires identifying ambiguity and performing sophisticated pragmatic reasoning. Second, loopholes pose an interesting and novel alignment problem where the model is presented with conflicting goals and can exploit ambiguities to its own advantage. To address these questions, we design scenarios where LLMs are given a goal and an ambiguous user instruction in conflict with the goal, with scenarios covering scalar implicature, structural ambiguities, and power dynamics. We then measure different models' abilities to exploit loopholes to satisfy their given goals as opposed to the goals of the user. We find that both closed-source and stronger open-source models can identify ambiguities and exploit their resulting loopholes, presenting a potential AI safety risk. Our analysis indicates that models which exploit loopholes explicitly identify and reason about both ambiguity and conflicting goals.