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arxiv: 2602.02039 · v2 · pith:ECTZRGFWnew · submitted 2026-02-02 · 💻 cs.AI · cs.CL· cs.DB· cs.LG

Hunt Instead of Wait: Evaluating Deep Data Research on Large Language Models

Pith reviewed 2026-05-21 13:58 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.AI cs.CLcs.DBcs.LG
keywords investigatory intelligencedeep data researchagentic LLMsDDR-Benchautonomous explorationdata science benchmarksLLM agency
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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.

The paper distinguishes investigatory intelligence, where agentic LLMs set their own goals and decide what to explore from raw data, from executional intelligence that follows given tasks. It introduces Deep Data Research as an open-ended task and DDR-Bench as a checklist-based benchmark to test autonomous insight extraction from databases. Evaluations of frontier models show emerging agency alongside clear shortfalls in sustaining long-horizon exploration. The central result is that success hinges on the models' own internal strategies rather than external agent setups or increased scale alone.

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

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2602.02039 by Michele Orini, Peijie Yu, Wei Liu, Yali Du, Yulan He.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Inference-time scaling performance in DDR-Bench across different dimensions. The y-axis reports checklist accuracy. Beyond final accuracy, DDR-Bench provides rich test-time exploration information from different scaling dimensions, enabling detailed analysis of model agency behaviour. See details in §4. 1. Introduction Agentic large language models (Agentic LLMs) (Zhang et al., 2025b) extend conventional L… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Left: Compared with previous tasks, DDR maximises exploration openness and agency, focusing on the direct evaluation of insight quality. Right: Overview of the DDR-Bench. Details of the trajectory samples are shown in Appendix H. haviour. (Plaat et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2025a; Yao et al., 2023; Xu et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2025b; Yehudai et al., 2025). However, most existing evaluations of agentic LLMs … view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: A case of Claude Sonnet 4.5’s trajectory and evaluation checklist in the MIMIC scenario of DDR-Bench. Verified fact and supporting insights are underlined. See details of this trajectory in Figure A16. The patient id is anonymised. on assessing model capabilities such as tool-use or long￾horizon reasoning, without confounding effects from ex￾ternal scaffolding. Third, exploration is unrestricted. No upper … view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Ranking correlation between novelty and accuracy on Proprietary and Open-Source LLMs. Circles denote the novelty rank, and diamonds denote the accuracy rank. Models are ordered by accuracy rank in the figure. All three scenarios present high correlation. Instead, DDR-Bench captures the dominant insight signal. Models with higher checklist scores also tend to generate novel insights that are judged to be mo… view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Exploration patterns of different models. The x-axis denotes exploration entropy, reflecting the depth of the model’s search over the database, while the y-axis represents database coverage, indicating the breadth of the search. 0 20 40 60 80 Interaction Progress (%) 7 6 5 4 3 2 Avg Log Probability MIMIC 0 20 40 60 80 Interaction Progress (%) GLOBEM 0 20 40 60 80 Interaction Progress (%) 10-K Qwen2.5 Qwen3… view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Self-termination visualisation on the Qwen family. jectory prefix containing varying numbers of turns. The results are shown in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p009_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Training-time factors study within the Qwen family. From left to right, the three columns examine inference-time scaling performance across all scenarios for models with different parameter scales, different context optimisation methods, and different model generations with different training strategies. pipeline, encompassing both pre-training and post-training stages (Yang et al., 2025a). 5.2. Agent Modu… view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Distribution of manually annotated error types across models and task scenarios. trend for an upward one. Less capable models, on the other hand, tended to make more fundamental errors, such as repeatedly debugging or struggling with missing data, which could disrupt the overall coherence of the analysis. 7. Hallucination Evaluation [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_8.png] view at source ↗
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.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

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)
  1. [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.
  2. [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)
  1. [Benchmark description] Clarify the exact number of databases and tasks in DDR-Bench, including any statistics on task diversity or difficulty distribution.
  2. [Results figures] Ensure all figures include error bars or confidence intervals for model performance comparisons.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

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
  1. 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

  2. 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

0 steps flagged

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

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

No free parameters, axioms, or invented entities are specified in the abstract; the work is presented as an empirical benchmark introduction.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5679 in / 1000 out tokens · 28595 ms · 2026-05-21T13:58:51.582985+00:00 · methodology

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Forward citations

Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Rewarding the Scientific Process: Process-Level Reward Modeling for Agentic Data Analysis

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    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

22 extracted references · 22 canonical work pages · cited by 1 Pith paper · 1 internal anchor

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    findings-acl.1016/

    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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    findings-emnlp.410/

    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,...

  3. [6]

    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

    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...

  4. [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...

  5. [8]

    NO INSIGHT

    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, ...

  6. [9]

    insufficient to support any insight

  7. [10]

    failed function call

  8. [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, ...

  9. [12]

    Determine if the messages can provide evidence to support the answer

  10. [13]

    Identify which specific message(s) by their index numbers[Message X]support or contradict the answer

  11. [14]

    Extract the evidence text from the relevant message(s)

  12. [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...

  13. [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

  14. [17]

    you can only call one tool every turn

  15. [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

  16. [19]

    keep exploring, build more and more complex params as turns go on and you will discover more in the data

    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

  17. [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:"...

  18. [21]

    It has to be related to the task: task

  19. [22]

    If there is no insight or error in the tool execution, respond with ’NO INSIGHT’

  20. [23]

    tools likelist_files, describe_table , get_database_info, get_field_description), respond with ’NO INSIGHT’

    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’

  21. [24]

    Focus on this point

    The insight from data should answer the question raised in the reason to execute this tool. Focus on this point

  22. [25]

    tool": "get_database_info

    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...