Who is the Agent to Blame? Localizing Faithfulness and Citation Mistakes in Agentic Deep Research

arXiv:2608.24306 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-08-25 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-08-25

Updated: 2026-08-25

Comments: Accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference). Code: https://github.com/eranhirs/who-is-the-agent-to-blame

Code: https://github.com/eranhirs/who-is-the-agent-to-blame

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Hallucination — 32× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Trace — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verifiability — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Elias — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agent Architectures — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Failure Modes — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Verification — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agentic Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Agentic Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Aggregation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Annotator Agreement — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Attention Mechanism — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Error Taxonomy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Interpretability — 1× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• LLM judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Multi-Agent System — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Multi-hop Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes

Sources

• DEER: A Benchmark for Evaluating Deep Research Agents on Expert Report Generation
• LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate
• DeepResearch Bench II: Diagnosing Deep Research Agents via Rubrics from Expert Reports
• Tongyi DeepResearch Technical Report
• WebWeaver: Structuring Web-Scale Evidence with Dynamic Outlines for Open-Ended Deep Research
• Cited but Not Verified: Parsing and Evaluating Source Attribution in LLM Deep Research Agents
• gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card
• OpenAI GPT-5 System Card
• Language agents achieve superhuman synthesis of scientific knowledge

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