Marco DeepResearch: Unlocking Efficient Deep Research Agents via Verification-Centric Design
Bin Zhu, Qianghuai Jia, Tian Lan, Junyang Ren, Feng Gu, Feihu Jiang, Longyue Wang, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo · Mar 30, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Low trustUse this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.
Best use
Background context only
What to verify
Validate the exact study setup in the full paper before operational use.
Evidence quality
Low
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Abstract
Deep research agents autonomously conduct open-ended investigations, integrating complex information retrieval with multi-step reasoning across diverse sources to solve real-world problems. To sustain this capability on long-horizon tasks, reliable verification is critical during both training and inference. A major bottleneck in existing paradigms stems from the lack of explicit verification mechanisms in QA data synthesis, trajectory construction, and test-time scaling. Errors introduced at each stage propagate downstream and degrade the overall agent performance. To address this, we present Marco DeepResearch, a deep research agent optimized with a verification-centric framework design at three levels: \textbf{(1)~QA Data Synthesis:} We introduce verification mechanisms to graph-based and agent-based QA synthesis to control question difficulty while ensuring answers are unique and correct; \textbf{(2)~Trajectory Construction:} We design a verification-driven trajectory synthesis method that injects explicit verification patterns into training trajectories; and \textbf{(3)~Test-time scaling:} We use Marco DeepResearch itself as a verifier at inference time and effectively improve performance on challenging questions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Marco DeepResearch agent significantly outperforms 8B-scale deep research agents on most challenging benchmarks, such as BrowseComp and BrowseComp-ZH. Crucially, under a maximum budget of 600 tool calls, Marco DeepResearch even surpasses or approaches several 30B-scale agents, like Tongyi DeepResearch-30B.