We now have a Deep Research for academia: SurveyX automatically writes academic surveys nearly indistinguishable from human-written ones π₯
Researchers from Beijing and Shanghai just published the first application of a deep research system to academia: their algorithm, given a question, can give you a survey of all papers on the subject.
To make a research survey, you generally follow two steps, preparation (collect and organize papers) and writing (outline creation, writing, polishing). Researchers followed the same two steps and automated them.
π― For the preparation part, a key part is find all the important references on the given subject. Researchers first cast a wide net of all relevant papers. But then finding the really important ones is like distilling knowledge from a haystack of information. To solve this challenge, they built an βAttributeTreeβ object that structures key information from citations. Ablating these AttributeTrees significantly decreased structure and synthesis scores, so they were really useful!
π For the writing part, key was to get a synthesis that's both short and true. This is not easy to get with LLMs! So they used methods like LLM-based deduplication to shorten the too verbose listings made by LLMs, and RAG to grab original quotes instead of made-up ones.
As a result, their system outperforms previous approaches by far!
As assessed by LLM-judges, the quality score os SurveyX even approaches this of human experts, with 4.59/5 vs 4.75/5 π
Agents seem to be everywhere and this collection is for a deep dive into the theory and practice:
1. "Agents" Google's whitepaper by Julia Wiesinger, Patrick Marlow and Vladimir Vuskovic -> https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-agents Covers agents, their functions, tool use and how they differ from models
3. "AI Engineer Summit 2025: Agent Engineering" 8-hour video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7BzTxVVMuw Experts' talks that share insights on the freshest Agent Engineering advancements, such as Google Deep Research, scaling tips and more
5. "Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents", 3rd Edition, book by David L. Poole and Alan K. Mackworth -> https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.html Agents' architectures, how they learn, reason, plan and act with certainty and uncertainty
7. The Turing Post articles "AI Agents and Agentic Workflows" on Hugging Face -> https://huggingface.co/Kseniase We explore agentic workflows in detail and agents' building blocks, such as memory and knowledge