DeepScholar-Bench: A Live Benchmark and Automated Evaluation for Generative Research Synthesis

Abstract

The ability to research and synthesize knowledge is central to human expertise and progress. A new class of AI systems--designed for generative research synthesis--aims to automate this process by retrieving information from the live web and producing long-form, cited reports. Yet, evaluating such systems remains an open challenge: existing question-answering benchmarks focus on short, factual answers, while expert-curated datasets risk staleness and data contamination. Neither captures the complexity and evolving nature of real research synthesis tasks. We introduce DeepScholar-bench, a live benchmark and automated evaluation framework for generative research synthesis. DeepScholar-bench draws queries and human-written exemplars from recent, high-quality ArXiv papers and evaluates a real synthesis task: generating a related work section by retrieving, synthesizing, and citing prior work. Our automated framework holistically measures performance across three key dimensions--knowledge synthesis, retrieval quality, and verifiability. To further future work, we also contribute DeepScholar-ref, a simple, open-source reference pipeline, which is implemented on the LOTUS framework and provides a strong baseline. Using DeepScholar-bench, we systematically evaluate prior open-source systems, search agents with strong models, OpenAI's DeepResearch, and DeepScholar-ref. We find DeepScholar-bench is far from saturated: no system surpasses a geometric mean of $31\%$ across all metrics. These results highlight both the difficulty and importance of DeepScholar-bench as a foundation for advancing AI systems capable of generative research synthesis. We make our benchmark code and data available at https://github.com/guestrin-lab/deepscholar-bench.