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Universal Deep Research: Bring Your Own Model and Strategy

Peter Belcak, Pavlo Molchanov

2025-09-03

Universal Deep Research: Bring Your Own Model and Strategy

Summary

This paper introduces a new system called Universal Deep Research, or UDR, which is designed to make AI-powered research more flexible and customizable.

What's the problem?

Currently, AI tools that help with in-depth research are very specific in *how* they do that research. Each tool is built with a particular strategy already programmed in, and you can't easily change it. It's like having a research assistant who only knows one way to find information, even if a different approach would be better for your specific question.

What's the solution?

UDR solves this by acting as a framework that can work with any language model. Instead of being pre-programmed, UDR lets *you* design the research process. You can create, change, and improve the steps the AI takes to find information, all without needing to retrain the AI itself. The researchers also included some example research strategies to show how it works and created a user interface to make it easier to experiment with.

Why it matters?

This is important because it makes AI research tools much more useful. Instead of being limited by the tool's built-in methods, you can tailor the research process to your exact needs, leading to more effective and relevant results. It opens the door to a wider range of research approaches and allows users to truly control how the AI helps them.

Abstract

Deep research tools are among the most impactful and most commonly encountered agentic systems today. We observe, however, that each deep research agent introduced so far is hard-coded to carry out a particular research strategy using a fixed choice of tools. We introduce Universal Deep Research (UDR), a generalist agentic system that wraps around any language model and enables the user to create, edit, and refine their own entirely custom deep research strategies without any need for additional training or finetuning. To showcase the generality of our system, we equip UDR with example minimal, expansive, and intensive research strategies, and provide a user interface to facilitate experimentation with the system.