Hunt Instead of Wait: Evaluating Deep Data Research on Large Language Models
Pith reviewed 2026-05-21 13:58 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
Investigatory intelligence in LLMs requires intrinsic exploration strategies beyond scaling or scaffolding.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
Defining investigatory intelligence as autonomy to set goals and explore in data contexts, the authors build DDR and DDR-Bench to evaluate LLMs starting from raw databases without explicit queries. Results indicate frontier models display some agency yet face persistent challenges with extended exploration, showing that intrinsic strategies within agentic models determine effective investigatory performance.
What carries the argument
DDR-Bench, the checklist-based benchmark that turns open-ended database exploration into verifiable scores for autonomous insight extraction.
Load-bearing premise
The checklist-based DDR-Bench measures genuine investigatory intelligence instead of model behaviors tuned to this particular evaluation format.
What would settle it
A demonstration that high DDR-Bench scores can be reached by models that follow checklists mechanically yet fail to extract useful insights when given new databases outside the benchmark.
Figures
read the original abstract
The agency expected of Agentic Large Language Models goes beyond answering correctly, requiring autonomy to set goals and decide what to explore. We term this investigatory intelligence, distinguishing it from executional intelligence, which merely completes assigned tasks. Data Science provides a natural testbed, as real-world analysis starts from raw data rather than explicit queries, yet few benchmarks focus on it. To address this, we introduce Deep Data Research (DDR), an open-ended task where LLMs autonomously extract key insights from databases, and DDR-Bench, a large-scale, checklist-based benchmark that enables verifiable evaluation. Results show that while frontier models display emerging agency, long-horizon exploration remains challenging. Our analysis highlights that effective investigatory intelligence depends not only on agent scaffolding or merely scaling, but also on intrinsic strategies of agentic models.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces the concept of investigatory intelligence for agentic LLMs, distinguishing it from executional intelligence. It defines Deep Data Research (DDR) as an open-ended task requiring autonomous insight extraction from raw databases and presents DDR-Bench, a large-scale checklist-based benchmark for verifiable evaluation of such tasks. Empirical results on frontier models indicate emerging agency but persistent difficulties with long-horizon exploration, leading to the claim that effective investigatory intelligence depends on intrinsic model strategies beyond agent scaffolding or scale alone.
Significance. If the benchmark and results hold, the work fills a gap in evaluating autonomous, open-ended data exploration capabilities in LLMs and provides evidence that intrinsic strategies contribute to agentic performance. This could inform future benchmark design and model development for long-horizon agency in AI systems.
major comments (2)
- [DDR-Bench construction and evaluation protocol] The central claim that performance differences reflect intrinsic strategies rather than scaffolding or scale alone rests on DDR-Bench providing a reliable measure of investigatory intelligence. However, the checklist approach (detailed in the benchmark construction) risks scoring models highly for exhaustive adherence to standard data-science steps (summary statistics, correlations, visualizations) without requiring genuine goal-setting or novel insight discovery, which could undermine attribution to intrinsic strategies.
- [Results and experimental setup] The abstract and results sections report outcomes on frontier models but provide insufficient detail on model selection criteria, database construction process, checklist validation against human experts, or statistical controls for prompt engineering effects. This makes it difficult to assess whether observed differences support the distinction between investigatory and executional intelligence.
minor comments (2)
- [Benchmark description] Clarify the exact number of databases and tasks in DDR-Bench, including any statistics on task diversity or difficulty distribution.
- [Results figures] Ensure all figures include error bars or confidence intervals for model performance comparisons.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for their constructive and detailed feedback, which has helped us identify opportunities to strengthen the clarity and rigor of our presentation. We address each major comment point by point below, indicating the specific revisions we will make to the next version of the manuscript.
read point-by-point responses
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Referee: [DDR-Bench construction and evaluation protocol] The central claim that performance differences reflect intrinsic strategies rather than scaffolding or scale alone rests on DDR-Bench providing a reliable measure of investigatory intelligence. However, the checklist approach (detailed in the benchmark construction) risks scoring models highly for exhaustive adherence to standard data-science steps (summary statistics, correlations, visualizations) without requiring genuine goal-setting or novel insight discovery, which could undermine attribution to intrinsic strategies.
Authors: We agree that a purely procedural checklist could conflate routine execution with genuine investigatory behavior. In the revised manuscript we have expanded the Benchmark Construction section to explicitly describe how each checklist item was derived from expert-identified key insights that require autonomous goal-setting and non-standard analytical paths (e.g., discovering latent interactions not captured by default summary statistics). We have also added concrete examples contrasting checklist items that reward rote steps versus those that reward novel insight discovery. Finally, we have inserted a short limitations subsection acknowledging that checklist verification remains an imperfect proxy and outlining planned future work on open-ended human judgment protocols. These changes preserve the original claim while making the link to intrinsic strategies more transparent. revision: yes
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Referee: [Results and experimental setup] The abstract and results sections report outcomes on frontier models but provide insufficient detail on model selection criteria, database construction process, checklist validation against human experts, or statistical controls for prompt engineering effects. This makes it difficult to assess whether observed differences support the distinction between investigatory and executional intelligence.
Authors: We accept that the original experimental description was insufficiently detailed for full reproducibility and for isolating the investigatory-versus-executional distinction. In the revised version we have substantially expanded the Experimental Setup section with: (i) explicit model-selection criteria (frontier models chosen for documented agentic tool-use capabilities rather than scale alone); (ii) the full database-generation pipeline, including how ground-truth insights were embedded and verified; (iii) the multi-expert checklist validation protocol together with inter-rater agreement statistics; and (iv) additional statistical controls (multiple prompt templates, permutation tests, and regression analysis of prompt-engineering variance). These additions directly support the claim that performance gaps reflect intrinsic model strategies beyond scaffolding or scale. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No circularity: empirical benchmark results independent of self-defined quantities
full rationale
The paper introduces DDR and DDR-Bench as an open-ended task and checklist-based evaluation for investigatory intelligence in LLMs, with claims resting on observed performance differences across models. No equations, fitted parameters, or derivations are described that reduce predictions to inputs by construction. The analysis of intrinsic strategies versus scaffolding or scale is presented as an empirical finding from benchmark runs rather than a self-referential definition or self-citation chain. The setup is self-contained against external benchmarks and does not invoke uniqueness theorems or ansatzes from prior author work.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
Lean theorems connected to this paper
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IndisputableMonolith/Cost/FunctionalEquation.leanwashburn_uniqueness_aczel unclear?
unclearRelation between the paper passage and the cited Recognition theorem.
We term this investigatory intelligence, distinguishing it from executional intelligence... DDR-Bench, a large-scale, checklist-based benchmark that enables verifiable evaluation.
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IndisputableMonolith/Foundation/DimensionForcing.leanalexander_duality_circle_linking unclear?
unclearRelation between the paper passage and the cited Recognition theorem.
exploration entropy... Normalised Exploration Entropy... balanced exploration regime
What do these tags mean?
- matches
- The paper's claim is directly supported by a theorem in the formal canon.
- supports
- The theorem supports part of the paper's argument, but the paper may add assumptions or extra steps.
- extends
- The paper goes beyond the formal theorem; the theorem is a base layer rather than the whole result.
- uses
- The paper appears to rely on the theorem as machinery.
- contradicts
- The paper's claim conflicts with a theorem or certificate in the canon.
- unclear
- Pith found a possible connection, but the passage is too broad, indirect, or ambiguous to say the theorem truly supports the claim.
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
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DataPRM is a new process reward model for data analysis agents that detects silent errors via environment interaction and ternary rewards, yielding 7-11% gains on benchmarks and further RL improvements.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
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URL https://aclanthology.org/2025. findings-acl.1016/. 15 Evaluating Deep Data Research on LLMs Islam, M. S., Laskar, M. T. R., Parvez, M. R., Hoque, E., and Joty, S. Datanarrative: Automated data-driven sto- rytelling with visualizations and texts.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.05346, 2024. Johnson, A. E., Bulgarelli, L., Shen, L., Gayles, A., Sham- mout, A.,...
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[2]
URL https://aclanthology.org/2025. findings-emnlp.410/. Lu, W., Zhang, J., Fan, J., Fu, Z., Chen, Y ., and Du, X. Large language model for table processing: a sur- vey.Frontiers Comput. Sci., 19(2):192350, 2025a. doi: 10.1007/S11704-024-40763-6. URL https://doi. org/10.1007/s11704-024-40763-6. Lu, Y ., Yang, S., Qian, C., Chen, G., Luo, Q., Wu, Y ., Wang,...
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[6]
URL https://openreview.net/forum? id=WE_vluYUL-X. Yao, Y ., Wang, Y ., Zhang, Y ., Lu, Y ., Gu, T., Li, L., Zhao, D., Wu, K., Wang, H., Nie, P., Teng, Y ., and Wang, Y . A rigorous benchmark with multidimensional evaluation for deep research agents: From answers to reports, 2025. URLhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02190. Yehudai, A., Eden, L., Li, A., Uziel, G...
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[7]
Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents
doi: 10.48550/ARXIV .2503.16416. URL https: //doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.16416. Yu, T., Zhang, R., Yang, K., Yasunaga, M., Wang, D., Li, Z., Ma, J., Li, I., Yao, Q., Roman, S., Zhang, Z., and Radev, D. R. Spider: A Large-scale Human-labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-domain Semantic Parsing and Text- to-SQL Task. In Riloff, E., Chiang, D., Hockenmaier...
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv doi:10.48550/arxiv 2018
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[8]
doi: 10.18653/V1/D18-1425. URL https:// doi.org/10.18653/v1/d18-1425. Zhang, C., Yang, K., Hu, S., Wang, Z., Li, G., Sun, Y ., Zhang, C., Zhang, Z., Liu, A., Zhu, S.-C., Chang, X., Zhang, J., Yin, F., Liang, Y ., and Yang, Y . Proagent: Building proactive cooperative agents with large lan- guage models, 2024. URL https://arxiv.org/ abs/2308.11339. Zhang, ...
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[9]
insufficient to support any insight
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[10]
failed function call
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[11]
when the interaction only invokes descriptive tools such as list_files, describe_table, get_database_info, orget_field_description The proportion of meaningful insights is then computed over all generated message-wise insights. In practice, at least two to three interactions are expected to involve descriptive tool calls and therefore produce no insight, ...
work page 2000
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[12]
Determine if the messages can provide evidence to support the answer
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[13]
Identify which specific message(s) by their index numbers[Message X]support or contradict the answer
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[14]
Extract the evidence text from the relevant message(s)
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[15]
The proportion of CORRECT_INFO is calculated as the final accuracy
Classify the context quality into one of three categories: CORRECT_INFO: Messages contain information that serves as evidence or support for the answer; INCORRECT_INFO: Messages contain information that contradicts the answer; INSUFFICIENT_INFO: Messages lack sufficient information to answer the question. The proportion of CORRECT_INFO is calculated as th...
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[16]
RETURN BOTH THE TEXT CONTENT AND THE TOOL CALL
always respond in a ReAct style: return what you’re thinking and planning to do, and then call the appropriate tool. RETURN BOTH THE TEXT CONTENT AND THE TOOL CALL
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[17]
you can only call one tool every turn
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[18]
BUT DO NOT INCLUDE ANY INSIGHTS OR REASONING IN THE TOOL CALLS
your reasoning should contain insights derived from last turn’s tool call results. BUT DO NOT INCLUDE ANY INSIGHTS OR REASONING IN THE TOOL CALLS. TOOLS ARE ONLY FOR DATA EXPLORE
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[19]
you should try your best to use the tools to get more information. keep exploring, build more and more complex params as turns go on and you will discover more in the data
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[20]
FINISH:" followed by your all insights collected from the whole dialogue and tool calls. Only use
first use the tools to check what data is available to you. TASK COMPLETION: When you can not gather more information, send a message that starts with "FINISH:" followed by your all insights collected from the whole dialogue and tool calls. Only use "FINISH:" when you are absolutely certain that no more information can be gathered. Carefully use "FINISH:"...
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[21]
It has to be related to the task: task
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[22]
If there is no insight or error in the tool execution, respond with ’NO INSIGHT’
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[23]
If it only use the data description tools (e.g. tools likelist_files, describe_table , get_database_info, get_field_description), respond with ’NO INSIGHT’
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[24]
The insight from data should answer the question raised in the reason to execute this tool. Focus on this point
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[25]
Keep all the data or statistics needed in your generated insight. ONLY respond with the insight. Figure A12.Prompt for Generating Message-wise InsightI m in DDR-Bench. Furthermore, the prompt includes scenario-specific evaluation criteria as well as JSON return fields to facilitate downstream data processing. Details can be found in the project code ateva...
work page 2008
discussion (0)
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