Step-DeepResearch Technical Report
Abstract
As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.20491,
title = {Step-DeepResearch Technical Report},
author = {Chen Hu and Haikuo Du and Heng Wang and Lin Lin and Mingrui Chen and Peng Liu and Ruihang Miao and Tianchi Yue and Wang You and Wei Ji and Wei Yuan and Wenjin Deng and Xiaojian Yuan and Xiaoyun Zhang and Xiangyu Liu and Xikai Liu and Yanming Xu and Yicheng Cao and Yifei Zhang and Yongyao Wang and Yubo Shu and Yurong Zhang and Yuxiang Zhang and Zheng Gong and Zhichao Chang and Binyan Li and Dan Ma and Furong Jia and Hongyuan Wang and Jiayu Liu and Jing Bai and Junlan Liu and Manjiao Liu and Na Wang and Qiuping Wu and Qinxin Du and Shiwei Li and Wen Sun and Yifeng Gong and Yonglin Chen and Yuling Zhao and Yuxuan Lin and Ziqi Ren and Zixuan Wang and Aihu Zhang and Brian Li and Buyun Ma and Kang An and Li Xie and Mingliang Li and Pan Li and Shidong Yang and Xi Chen and Xiaojia Liu and Yuchu Luo and Yuan Song and YuanHao Ding and Yuanwei Liang and Zexi Li and Zhaoning Zhang and Zixin Zhang and Binxing Jiao and Daxin Jiang and Jiansheng Chen and Jing Li and Xiangyu Zhang and Yibo Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.20491},
year = {2025}
}