# Web, search, and research agents Area: [LLM agents and tool use](https://mlsanity.com/agents/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/ ## Key facts - Web, search, and research agents: 1,671 papers on arXiv since 2022 (data through 14 Oct 2026). - 193 of its 1,671 mapped papers (12%) cite “WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents” (2023, arXiv 2307.13854). - 170 of its 1,671 mapped papers (10%) cite “Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web” (2023, arXiv 2306.06070). - 109 new papers 17 Sep–14 Oct. ## Most cited here - [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023), cited by 193 papers here - [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023), cited by 170 papers here - [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022), cited by 116 papers here - [WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13919/) (2024), cited by 95 papers here - [GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01614/) (2024), cited by 88 papers here - [VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13649/) (2024), cited by 86 papers here - [Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05366/) (2025), cited by 85 papers here - [MLAgentBench: Evaluating Language Agents on Machine Learning Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03302/) (2023), cited by 78 papers here - [MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07095/) (2024), cited by 78 papers here - [Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04227/) (2025), cited by 74 papers here ## New (17 Sep–14 Oct) - [Same Context, Different Agents: A Behavioral Study of Semantic Layers, Orchestration and Compaction in Data Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20959/) (2026-10-14) - [TreeFlex: Agents Navigating Their Own Search Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20334/) (2026-10-14) - [CASI: Credit Assignment via Set Intervention for Agentic Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20293/) (2026-10-14) - [Retrieve What Helps, Only When It Helps: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Selective Retrieval-Augmented Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19528/) (2026-10-14) - [Knowledge Graphs as Files: An Agent Harness Where Tool Creation and Tool Use Co-Evolve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18616/) (2026-10-13) - [Legal-R1: Agentic Retrieval for Evidence-Based Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18611/) (2026-10-13) - [Delegating Earth science model calibration to knowledge-guided LLM agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18378/) (2026-10-13) - [JevGPT: Thinking Fast and Slow in Autonomous Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18272/) (2026-10-13) - [LifeSearch: Benchmarking Deep Research Agents for Real-World Life and Productivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18092/) (2026-10-13) - [FRACTION: Fraud Explanation Generation via Agentic Graph Context Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18023/) (2026-10-13) - [Searching for What Matters: Open-Ended Discovery of Multiple Hypotheses with Agentic Data Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17874/) (2026-10-13) - [RIVO: Lightweight Adaptive Rerouting for Deep Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15910/) (2026-10-11) - [Google Earth AI Geospatial Reasoning Agent: Capabilities and a Systematic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15750/) (2026-10-11) - [Triage-PiEvo: Evidence Admission for Principle-Evolving Scientific Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14683/) (2026-10-10) - [SciCurateBench: Curating Experimental Data from Heterogeneous Scientific Literature with Verbal-Action Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14393/) (2026-10-09) - [A Baseline Assessment for the Agentic Web Technology Stack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13703/) (2026-10-09) - [Webhell: A Unified Interface for Agentic Web Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13416/) (2026-10-09) - [JANUS: Enhancing Long-Horizon Autonomous Research with Co-Evolving World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13194/) (2026-10-09) - [Locate, Judge, Read: Role-Specialized Tool Agents over a Knowledge-Point Index for Open-Domain Multimodal Document QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13128/) (2026-10-09) - [LongHarness: Advancing Agentic Reasoning over 100M-Token Corpora via Stateful Evidence Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13075/) (2026-10-09) - [When Charts Deceive Web Agents: A Paired Benchmark for Misleading Visualization-Grounded Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12823/) (2026-10-09) - [Project Greenhouse: Progress Toward Fully Open and Sovereign Agentic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11922/) (2026-10-08) - [SAIL: Scientific Agentic Intelligence via a Science-Aware Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11451/) (2026-10-08) - [RIT-RAG: Navigating Document Corpora with Retrieval-Induced Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11370/) (2026-10-08) - [From Plausible Hierarchies to Useful Taxonomies: Evaluating Agentic Harnesses on Customer Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09377/) (2026-10-07) - [Agentic AutoRAG: RAG Pipeline Optimization through Reasoning-Driven Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08452/) (2026-10-06) - [From Delivery to Stateful Exploration: Rethinking the Index for Agentic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07960/) (2026-10-06) - [Leveraging a four-quadrant approach for evaluating Redpine Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07937/) (2026-10-06) - [RA-MoWE: Workflow-Affinity Embeddings for Query Clustering and Agentic Workflow Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07851/) (2026-10-06) - [ST-Bench: A Spatial-Temporal Benchmark for Multi-Agent System Generation on Scientific Research Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07763/) (2026-10-06)