Nomad: Autonomous Exploration and Discovery

Abstract

We introduce Nomad, a system for autonomous data exploration and insight discovery. Given a corpus of documents, databases, or other data sources, users rarely know the full set of questions, hypotheses, or connections that could be explored. As a result, query-driven question answering and prompt-driven deep-research systems remain limited by human framing and often fail to cover the broader insight space. Nomad addresses this problem with an exploration-first architecture. It constructs an explicit Exploration Map over the domain and systematically traverses it to balance breadth and depth. It generates and selects hypotheses and investigates them with an explorer agent that can use document search, web search, and database tools. Candidate insights are then checked by an independent verifier before entering a reporting pipeline that produces cited reports and higher-level meta-reports. We also present a comprehensive evaluation framework for autonomous discovery systems that measures trustworthiness, report quality, and diversity. Using corpora of selected UN and WHO reports and arXiv papers on LLM agents, we show that Nomad produces reports with strong numeric grounding, higher overall quality and actionability than baselines, and more diverse insights over several runs. Nomad is a step toward autonomous systems that not only answer user questions or conduct directed research, but also discover which questions, research directions, and insights are worth surfacing in the first place.