@inproceedings{xie-etal-2026-dr3,
title = "{DR}$^3$-Eval: Towards Realistic and Reproducible Deep Research Evaluation",
author = "Xie, Qianqian and
Zhu, He and
Han, Xueming and
Xiong, Qingheng and
Xia, Tiantian and
Meng, Fanyu and
Wang, Jiakai and
Bai, Zhiqi and
Jiang, Chengkang and
Wang, Zhaohui and
Guo, Yubin and
Wen, Yuqing and
Mao, Jiayang and
Zhang, Zijie and
Li, Shihao and
Wang, Yanghai and
Ren, Yuxiang and
Feng, Junlan and
Liu, Jiaheng",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1691/",
pages = "38472--38504",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to solve complex, long-horizon research tasks involving planning, retrieval, multimodal understanding, and report generation, yet their evaluation remains challenging due to dynamic web environments and ambiguous task definitions. We propose **DR$^3$-Eval**, a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating deep research agents on multimodal, multi-file report generation. DR$^3$-Eval is constructed from authentic user-provided materials and paired with a per-task static research sandbox corpus that simulates open-web complexity while remaining fully verifiable, containing supportive documents, distractors, and noise. Moreover, we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework measuring Information Recall, Factual Accuracy, Citation Coverage, Instruction Following, and Depth Quality, and validate its alignment with human judgments. Experiments with our developed multi-agent system DR$^3$-Agent based on multiple state-of-the-art language models demonstrate that DR$^3$-Eval is highly challenging and reveals critical failure modes in retrieval robustness and hallucination control."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="xie-etal-2026-dr3">
<titleInfo>
<title>DR³-Eval: Towards Realistic and Reproducible Deep Research Evaluation</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Qianqian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xie</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">He</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Xueming</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Han</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Qingheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xiong</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tiantian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Xia</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Fanyu</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Meng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiakai</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zhiqi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bai</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Chengkang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jiang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zhaohui</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yubin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Guo</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yuqing</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiayang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mao</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zijie</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Shihao</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yanghai</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yuxiang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ren</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Junlan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Feng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiaheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-459-0</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to solve complex, long-horizon research tasks involving planning, retrieval, multimodal understanding, and report generation, yet their evaluation remains challenging due to dynamic web environments and ambiguous task definitions. We propose **DR³-Eval**, a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating deep research agents on multimodal, multi-file report generation. DR³-Eval is constructed from authentic user-provided materials and paired with a per-task static research sandbox corpus that simulates open-web complexity while remaining fully verifiable, containing supportive documents, distractors, and noise. Moreover, we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework measuring Information Recall, Factual Accuracy, Citation Coverage, Instruction Following, and Depth Quality, and validate its alignment with human judgments. Experiments with our developed multi-agent system DR³-Agent based on multiple state-of-the-art language models demonstrate that DR³-Eval is highly challenging and reveals critical failure modes in retrieval robustness and hallucination control.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">xie-etal-2026-dr3</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1691/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-10</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>38472</start>
<end>38504</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T DR³-Eval: Towards Realistic and Reproducible Deep Research Evaluation
%A Xie, Qianqian
%A Zhu, He
%A Han, Xueming
%A Xiong, Qingheng
%A Xia, Tiantian
%A Meng, Fanyu
%A Wang, Jiakai
%A Bai, Zhiqi
%A Jiang, Chengkang
%A Wang, Zhaohui
%A Guo, Yubin
%A Wen, Yuqing
%A Mao, Jiayang
%A Zhang, Zijie
%A Li, Shihao
%A Wang, Yanghai
%A Ren, Yuxiang
%A Feng, Junlan
%A Liu, Jiaheng
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F xie-etal-2026-dr3
%X Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to solve complex, long-horizon research tasks involving planning, retrieval, multimodal understanding, and report generation, yet their evaluation remains challenging due to dynamic web environments and ambiguous task definitions. We propose **DR³-Eval**, a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating deep research agents on multimodal, multi-file report generation. DR³-Eval is constructed from authentic user-provided materials and paired with a per-task static research sandbox corpus that simulates open-web complexity while remaining fully verifiable, containing supportive documents, distractors, and noise. Moreover, we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework measuring Information Recall, Factual Accuracy, Citation Coverage, Instruction Following, and Depth Quality, and validate its alignment with human judgments. Experiments with our developed multi-agent system DR³-Agent based on multiple state-of-the-art language models demonstrate that DR³-Eval is highly challenging and reveals critical failure modes in retrieval robustness and hallucination control.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1691/
%P 38472-38504
Markdown (Informal)
[DR3-Eval: Towards Realistic and Reproducible Deep Research Evaluation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1691/) (Xie et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Qianqian Xie, He Zhu, Xueming Han, Qingheng Xiong, Tiantian Xia, Fanyu Meng, Jiakai Wang, Zhiqi Bai, Chengkang Jiang, Zhaohui Wang, Yubin Guo, Yuqing Wen, Jiayang Mao, Zijie Zhang, Shihao Li, Yanghai Wang, Yuxiang Ren, Junlan Feng, and Jiaheng Liu. 2026. DR3-Eval: Towards Realistic and Reproducible Deep Research Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 38472–38504, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.