Benchmark Almanac

DeepResearch Bench II

Xiaoyi DeepResearch 7.0 61.9% tops its leaderboard OpenAI deep research 43.1% leads the models we track Not in model cards

Deep research agents write reports for 132 research briefs in 22 domains, each derived from a review article they may not consult. A judge model checks 9,287 expert criteria.

Same team as DeepResearch Bench. In August 2026 the judge moved from Gemini 2.5 Pro to GPT-5.5, so the two leaderboards are not comparable. Mercor also runs it on about 30 models.

In the authors’ words

Deep Research Agents (DRA) aim to help users search the web, synthesize information, and deliver comprehensive investigative reports. Prior benchmarks often either under-evaluate a system's ability to produce meaningful insights and high-quality writing, or adopt coarse or LLM-defined criteria that are hard to verify and can diverge from human expert judgment. To address these issues, we introduce Deep Research Bench II, a new benchmark for evaluating DRAs. It contains 132 grounded research tasks across 22 domains; for each task, an agent must produce a research report that is evaluated by a set of 9,430 fine-grained binary rubrics in total, covering three dimensions: information recall, analysis, and presentation. All rubrics are derived from carefully selected expert-written investigative articles and are constructed through a four-stage LLM+human pipeline that combines automatic extraction with over 400 human-hours of expert review, ensuring that the criteria are verifiable and aligned with human expert judgment. We evaluate several state-of-the-art deep-research agents on Deep Research Bench II and find that even the strongest models satisfy fewer than 50% of the rubrics, revealing a substantial gap between current DRAs and human experts. We release the benchmark, evaluation scripts, and all rubrics at https://github.com/imlrz/DeepResearch-Bench-II to facilitate future research on deep-rearch agents.

Abstract of DeepResearch Bench II: Diagnosing Deep Research Agents via Rubrics from Expert Reports (arXiv:2601.08536, CC0)
Made by University of Science and Technology of China and Metastone Technology Released Jan 2026 Deep research All tasks public Last model added Feb 2025 Scores refreshed 2 Nov 2026
Level
Expert Specialists with years of training, often over hours of work
Scored
Graded by a model A language model scores each response, usually against a rubric.
Answers
Open-ended Free-form text, documents, designs or media judged as a whole.
10
Entries on its own leaderboard, 1 model we track

Xiaoyi DeepResearch 7.0 tops the leaderboard with 61.9%

Best score per entry from the benchmark's own leaderboard, read on 2 Nov 2026. Where a model ran with several settings or harnesses, we keep its best. Names in gray aren't in our model list: fine-tunes, agent systems, products and older models. They don't count toward leaders. The best model we track is OpenAI deep research, at 43.1%.

  1. 1 Xiaoyi DeepResearch 7.0 61.9%
  2. 2 Beane Harness by Jatin Hans 60.5%
  3. 3 SPIA DeepResearch 59%
  4. 4 ATH-Voicepica-DeepResearch 57.6%
  5. 5 deep-cove-research-pro 57%
  6. 6 OpenAI deep research 43.1%
  7. 7 Gemini 3 Pro Deep Research 41.5%
  8. 8 Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Research 39.9%
  9. 9 Doubao Deep Research 37.3%
  10. 10 Perplexity Research 33.6%
#EntryScoreSettingDateSource
1 Xiaoyi DeepResearch 7.0 61.9% Official leaderboard
2 Beane Harness by Jatin Hans 60.5% Official leaderboard
3 SPIA DeepResearch 59% Official leaderboard
4 ATH-Voicepica-DeepResearch 57.6% Official leaderboard
5 deep-cove-research-pro 57% Official leaderboard
6 OpenAI deep research 43.1% Feb 2025 Official leaderboard
7 Gemini 3 Pro Deep Research 41.5% Official leaderboard
8 Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Research 39.9% Official leaderboard
9 Doubao Deep Research 37.3% Official leaderboard
10 Perplexity Research 33.6% Official leaderboard

Scores over time

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

On the benchmark’s own leaderboard
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) OpenAI deep research 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2025 Near the ceiling (85%) OpenAI deep research

No lab model card reports it yet

We read the headline results of 479 launch posts from 51 labs, and none of them list this benchmark.

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