mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

DocDancer: Towards Agentic Document-Grounded Information Seeking

arXiv 2601.05163 ↗First posted 8 Jan 2026cs.CLcited by 11

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Document Question Answering (DocQA) focuses on answering questions grounded in given documents, yet existing DocQA agents lack effective tool utilization and largely rely on closed-source models. In this work, we introduce DocDancer, an end-to-end trained open-source Doc agent. We formulate DocQA as an information-seeking problem and propose a tool-driven agent framework that explicitly models document exploration and comprehension. To enable end-to-end training of such agents, we introduce an Exploration-then-Synthesis data synthesis pipeline that addresses the scarcity of high-quality training data for DocQA. Training on the synthesized data, the trained models on two long-context document understanding benchmarks, MMLongBench-Doc and DocBench, show their effectiveness. Further analysis provides valuable insights for the agentic tool design and synthetic data.

Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 30 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2026.

Builds on

30 of 39 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents17 Feb

Other references · 29

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
  3. 2019Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelismcited by 1,829
  4. 2019LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understandingcited by 549
  5. 2024SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuningcited by 345
  6. 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agentscited by 255
  7. 2023FireAct: Toward Language Agent Fine-tuningcited by 247
  8. 2024VisRAG: Vision-based Retrieval-augmented Generation on Multi-modality Documentscited by 237
  9. 2021CUAD: An Expert-Annotated NLP Dataset for Legal Contract Reviewcited by 232
  10. 2024MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizationscited by 174
  11. 2025WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversalcited by 171
  12. 2025APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplaycited by 158
17 more
  1. 2024OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesiscited by 155
  2. 2023Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE)cited by 132
  3. 2024mPLUG-DocOwl2: High-resolution Compressing for OCR-free Multi-page Document Understandingcited by 113
  4. 2025A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modelingcited by 113
  5. 2024LongDocURL: a Comprehensive Multimodal Long Document Benchmark Integrating Understanding, Reasoning, and Locatingcited by 70
  6. 2025MDocAgent: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understandingcited by 66
  7. 2025MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Long Documentscited by 43
  8. 2024DOCBENCH: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Document Reading Systemscited by 37
  9. 2025Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Generation for Document Question Answeringcited by 33
  10. 2025Visual Document Understanding and Reasoning: A Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework with Agent-Wise Adaptive Test-Time Scalingcited by 30
  11. 2023PDFTriage: Question Answering over Long, Structured Documentscited by 29
  12. 2025SimpleDoc: Multi-Modal Document Understanding with Dual-Cue Page Retrieval and Iterative Refinementcited by 27
  13. 2022V-Doc : Visual questions answers with Documentscited by 19
  14. 2025RAG-Anything: All-in-One RAG Frameworkcited by 18
  15. 2025DocLens : A Tool-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Long Visual Document Understandingcited by 15
  16. 2023DocXChain: A Powerful Open-Source Toolchain for Document Parsing and Beyondcited by 8
  17. 2025AUTO-Explorer: Automated Data Collection for GUI Agentcited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026OfficeQA Pro: An Enterprise Benchmark for End-to-End Grounded Reasoning
  2. 2026DocNavRAG: Document-Structured Graph RAG with Stateful Evidence Construction for Complex Document Question Answering
  3. 2026Strategic Navigation or Stochastic Search? How Agents and Humans Reason Over Document Collections
  4. 2026SPD-RAG: Sub-Agent Per Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  5. 2025Synthesizing Agentic Data for Web Agents with Progressive Difficulty Enhancement Mechanisms
  6. 2026Training a Knowledge Base: Supervised Structure Learning for Agent-Curated Document Stores
  7. 2025InfoDeepSeek: Benchmarking Agentic Information Seeking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  8. 2025O2-Searcher: A Searching-based Agent Model for Open-Domain Open-Ended Question Answering