# PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10120 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10120/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 16 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05376/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13169/) (2022)
- [AutoAgents: A Framework for Automatic Agent Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17288/) (2023)
- [Agent Q: Advanced Reasoning and Learning for Autonomous AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07199/) (2024)
- [SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14259/) (2023)
- [Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14207/) (2024)
- [LitLLM: A Toolkit for Scientific Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01788/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model based Long-tail Query Rewriting in Taobao Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03758/) (2023)
- [LLMs as Research Tools: A Large Scale Survey of Researchers' Usage and Perceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05025/) (2024)
- [Reason for Future, Act for Now: A Principled Framework for Autonomous LLM Agents with Provable Sample Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17382/) (2023)
- [AGILE: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Framework of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14751/) (2024)
- [Robust Planning with LLM-Modulo Framework: Case Study in Travel Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20625/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Towards Scientific Intelligence: A Survey of LLM-based Scientific Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24047/) (2025)
- [A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05668/) (2025)
- [A Survey of LLM-Driven AI Agent Communication: Protocols, Security Risks, and Defense Countermeasures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19676/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Uncertainty: Entropy-Modulated Policy Gradients for Long-Horizon LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09265/) (2025)
- [Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05151/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search: Towards Next-Generation Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05659/) (2025)
- [When AI Co-Scientists Fail: SPOT-a Benchmark for Automated Verification of Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11855/) (2025)
- [AI Scientists Fail Without Strong Implementation Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01372/) (2025)
- [DeepWideSearch: Benchmarking Depth and Width in Agentic Information Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20168/) (2025)
- [Enterprise Deep Research: Steerable Multi-Agent Deep Research for Enterprise Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17797/) (2025)
- [WebGym: Scaling Training Environments for Visual Web Agents with Realistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02439/) (2026)
- [InfoDeepSeek: Benchmarking Agentic Information Seeking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15872/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning Foundations for Deep Research Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06733/) (2025)
- [AutoResearchBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Complex Scientific Literature Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25256/) (2026)
- [AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18661/) (2026)
- [LLLMs: A Data-Driven Survey of Evolving Research on Limitations of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19240/) (2025)
- [Evolving Roles of LLMs in Scientific Innovation: Assistant, Collaborator, Scientist, and Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11810/) (2025)
- [Paper2Rebuttal: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transparent Author Response Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14171/) (2026)
- [CAPO: Critic-Guided Action-Aligned Policy Optimization for Advancing LLM Agent Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18401/) (2026)
- [SPAR: Scholar Paper Retrieval with LLM-based Agents for Enhanced Academic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15245/) (2025)
- [PaperScout: An Autonomous Agent for Academic Paper Search with Process-Aware Sequence-Level Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10029/) (2026)
- [Table-as-Search: Formulate Long-Horizon Agentic Information Seeking as Table Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06724/) (2026)
- [Agentic AutoSurvey: Let LLMs Survey LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18661/) (2025)
- [LLM-guided Hierarchical Search for End-to-end Reasoning Intensive Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13217/) (2025)
- [BioMedSearch: A Multi-Source Biomedical Retrieval Framework Based on LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13926/) (2025)
- [Idea2Plan: Exploring AI-Powered Research Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24891/) (2025)
- [WisPaper: Your AI Scholar Search Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06879/) (2025)
- [Learning to Rewrite Tool Descriptions for Reliable LLM-Agent Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20426/) (2026)
- [M-DocSum: Do LVLMs Genuinely Comprehend Interleaved Image-Text in Document Summarization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21839/) (2025)
- [OpenLens AI: Fully Autonomous Research Agent for Health Infomatics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14778/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models. PaSa can autonomously make a series of decisions, including invoking search tools, reading papers, and selecting relevant references, to ultimately obtain comprehensive and accurate results for complex scholar queries. We optimize PaSa using reinforcement learning with a synthetic dataset, AutoScholarQuery, which includes 35k fine-grained academic queries and corresponding papers sourced from top-tier AI conference publications. Additionally, we develop RealScholarQuery, a benchmark collecting real-world academic queries to assess PaSa performance in more realistic scenarios. Despite being trained on synthetic data, PaSa significantly outperforms existing baselines on RealScholarQuery, including Google, Google Scholar, Google with GPT-4o for paraphrased queries, ChatGPT (search-enabled GPT-4o), GPT-o1, and PaSa-GPT-4o (PaSa implemented by prompting GPT-4o). Notably, PaSa-7B surpasses the best Google-based baseline, Google with GPT-4o, by 37.78% in recall@20 and 39.90% in recall@50, and exceeds PaSa-GPT-4o by 30.36% in recall and 4.25% in precision. Model, datasets, and code are available at https://github.com/bytedance/pasa.