NanoResearch: Co-Evolving Skills, Memory, and Policy for Personalized Research Automation
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM-powered multi-agent systems can now automate the full research pipeline from ideation to paper writing, but a fundamental question remains: automation for whom? Researchers operate under different resource configurations, hold different methodological preferences, and target different output formats. A system that produces uniform outputs regardless of these differences will systematically under-serve every individual user, making personalization a precondition for research automation to be genuinely usable. However, achieving it requires three capabilities that current systems lack: accumulating reusable procedural knowledge across projects, retaining user-specific experience across sessions, and internalizing implicit preferences that resist explicit formalization. We propose NanoResearch, a multi-agent framework that addresses these gaps through tri-level co-evolution. A skill bank distills recurring operations into compact procedural rules reusable across projects. A memory module maintains user- and project-specific experience that grounds planning decisions in each user's research history. A label-free policy learning converts free-form feedback into persistent parameter updates of the planner, reshaping subsequent coordination. These three layers co-evolve: reliable skills produce richer memory, richer memory informs better planning, and preference internalization continuously realigns the loop to each user. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NanoResearch delivers substantial gains over state-of-the-art AI research systems, and progressively refines itself to produce better research at lower cost over successive cycles.
Key facts. Cited by 4 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 28 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.
Builds on
28 of 38 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
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- 2025ResearchCodeAgent: An LLM Multi-Agent System for Automated Codification of Research Methodologies28 Apr
- 2025The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search10 Apr
Other references · 24
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12 more
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- 2026AutoSOTA: An End-to-End Automated Research System for State-of-the-Art AI Model Discoverycited by 17
- 2025OmniScientist: Toward a Co-evolving Ecosystem of Human and AI Scientistscited by 15
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
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- 2026What is Missing from AI Post-Training AI: An Empirical Analysis19 Aug 2026
- 2026ARAC: Benchmarking Auto-Research's Alignment and Completeness on End-to-End Researchs13 Aug 2026
- 2026Fewer Tokens, Smaller Cache: Reward-Coordinated Efficient Reasoning5 Aug 2026
- 2026SPARK: Susceptibility-Guided Profiling and Steering of Latent Reasoning States in Large Language Models11 Jul 2026
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