# DeepRead: Document Structure-Aware Reasoning to Enhance Agentic Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05014 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05014/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)
- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05366/) (2025)
- [FinanceBench: A New Benchmark for Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11944/) (2023)
- [MinerU: An Open-Source Solution for Precise Document Content Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18839/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18234/) (2025)
- [PaddleOCR-VL: Boosting Multilingual Document Parsing via a 0.9B Ultra-Compact Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14528/) (2025)
- [LongRAG: A Dual-Perspective Retrieval-Augmented Generation Paradigm for Long-Context Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18050/) (2024)
- [dots.ocr: Multilingual Document Layout Parsing in a Single Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02498/) (2025)
- [PlanRAG: A Plan-then-Retrieval Augmented Generation for Generative Large Language Models as Decision Makers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12430/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Question Answering for Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01839/) (2016)
- [HunyuanOCR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19575/) (2025)
- [BookRAG: A Hierarchical Structure-aware Index-based Approach for Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Complex Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03413/) (2025)
- [Question Decomposition for Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00355/) (2025)
- [SyllabusQA: A Course Logistics Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14666/) (2024)
- [SentGraph: Hierarchical Sentence Graph for Multi-hop Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03014/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Long-Document Retrieval in the PLM and LLM Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07759/) (2025)
- [Detect, Retrieve, Comprehend: A Flexible Framework for Zero-Shot Document-Level Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01959/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Governed Memory: A Production Architecture for Multi-Agent Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17787/) (2026)
- [Navigating Large-Scale Document Collections: MuDABench for Multi-Document Analytical QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22239/) (2026)
- [MPDocBench-Parse: Benchmarking Practical Multi-page Document Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22100/) (2026)
- [XL-DocBench: Benchmarking Evidence-Grounded Extra-Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00036/) (2026)
- [DocAtlas: Long-Document Understanding as Mutable-State Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07527/) (2026)
- [VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11390/) (2026)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of tool-use capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is shifting from static, one-shot retrieval toward autonomous, multi-turn evidence acquisition. However, existing agentic search frameworks typically treat long documents as flat collections of unstructured chunks, disregarding the native hierarchical organization and sequential logic essential for human comprehension. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepRead, a structure-aware document reasoning agent designed to operationalize document-native structural priors into actionable reasoning capabilities. Leveraging the structural fidelity of modern OCR, DeepRead constructs a paragraph-level, coordinate-based navigation system and equips the LLM with two synergistic tools: textsfRetrieve for scanning-aware localization, and textsfReadSection for contiguous, order-preserving reading within specific hierarchical scopes. This design elicits a human-like ``locate-then-read'' reasoning paradigm, effectively mitigating the context fragmentation inherent in traditional retrieval methods. Extensive evaluations across four benchmarks spanning diverse document types demonstrate that DeepRead outperforms Search-o1-style agentic search baselines by an average of 10.3%. Fine-grained behavioral analysis further confirms that DeepRead autonomously adopts human-aligned reading strategies, validating the critical role of structural awareness in achieving precise document reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhanli-Li/DeepRead.