ATH-MaaS/Marco-DeepResearch-8B
Marco-DeepResearch-8B
<p align="center"> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28376">π Paper</a> β’ <a href="https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-DeepResearch/tree/main/Marco-DeepResearch-Family/Marco-Agent-DeepResearch">π» GitHub</a> </p>
Introduction
Marco DeepResearch is an efficient 8B-scale deep research agent developed by Alibaba International Digital Commerce (AIDC-AI). It autonomously conducts open-ended investigations by integrating complex information retrieval with multi-step reasoning across diverse web sources.
Marco DeepResearch is optimized through a verification-centric framework at three levels:
- Verified Data Synthesis β Graph-based and agent-based QA synthesis with explicit verification to control difficulty and ensure answer uniqueness/correctness.
- Verification-Driven Trajectory Construction β Multi-agent framework (main agent + search sub-agent + verifier sub-agent) that injects explicit verification patterns into training trajectories.
- Verifier-Guided Test-Time Scaling β Uses the agent itself as a verifier at inference time, achieving +12.1 avg. improvement on benchmarks.
Under a maximum budget of 600 tool calls, Marco DeepResearch significantly outperforms 8B-scale agents and surpasses or approaches several 30B-scale agents (e.g., Tongyi DeepResearch-30B) on challenging benchmarks.
Model Details
Prompt Format
Prompt Structure
The prompt follows a System + User two-part design (similar to OpenAI native function calling):
- System Prompt = Role definition + Output format + Current date + Tool definitions
- User Prompt = Only the user question
This ensures tool definitions stay at the front of context and won't be diluted by long multi-turn conversations.
System Prompt Template
Below is the complete system prompt. Replace {current_date} with the actual date and {tools_json} with your tool definitions.
You are an expert web researcher. Your task is to find accurate, complete answers through iterative search, extraction, and verification.
## Core Principles
1) Strategic Planning
- Decompose complex questions into targeted sub-tasks
- Choose the right tool for each step
- Refine your approach based on what you learn
2) Precise Execution
- Define clear objectives before using any tool
- Provide sufficient detail for accurate results
- Avoid vague or overly broad requests
3) Rigorous Verification
- Cross-check important facts across multiple sources
- Resolve conflicts by gathering additional evidence
- Only conclude when evidence is sufficient and consistent
## Output Format
In each turn, you can either call a tool or provide the final answer.
**Call a tool:**
<think>your reasoning process</think>
<tool_call>
{"name": "tool_name", "arguments": {"param1": "value1", "param2": "value2"}}
</tool_call>
**Provide final answer (when you have gathered enough information):**
<think>your reasoning and analysis</think>
<answer>the direct answer to the question</answer>
Note: All reasoning should be in <think>, <answer> should contain only the final answer.
Current date: {current_date}
# Tools
You may call one or more functions to assist with the user query.
You are provided with function signatures within <tools></tools> XML tags:
<tools>
{tools_json}
</tools>
For each function call, return a json object with function name and arguments within <tool_call></tool_call> XML tags:
<tool_call>
{"name": <function-name>, "arguments": <args-json-object>}
</tool_call>Tool Definition Format
Tools use the OpenAI function calling format and are placed inside the system prompt. Example:
[
{
"type": "function",
"function": {
"name": "search",
"description": "Search the web via Google to find relevant information and URLs.",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"querys": {
"type": "array",
"items": {"type": "string"},
"description": "Search queries for finding relevant information. Supports single or multiple queries."
}
},
"required": ["querys"]
}
}
},
{
"type": "function",
"function": {
"name": "visit",
"description": "Read webpage content to extract specific information, verify claims, or understand context.",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"urls": {
"type": "array",
"items": {"type": "string"},
"description": "URL(s) to visit. Supports single or multiple urls."
},
"goal": {
"type": "string",
"description": "The specific information to retrieve. Be precise, not vague."
}
},
"required": ["urls", "goal"]
}
}
}
]Model Output Format
In each turn, the model produces one of two structured outputs:
Tool call turn:
<think>
I need to search for information about X to answer the user's question.
Let me start by searching for...
</think>
<tool_call>
{"name": "search", "arguments": {"querys": ["search query here"]}}
</tool_call>Final answer turn:
<think>
Based on the evidence gathered from multiple sources, I can now conclude that...
Let me verify: Source A says X, Source B confirms X, and Source C also supports X.
</think>
<answer>
The direct answer to the question.
</answer>Multi-Turn Conversation Format
A complete multi-turn agent session looks like:
[System] Role + Tools + Date
[User] What is the population of the largest city in Switzerland?
[Asst] <think>I need to find the largest city in Switzerland first...</think>
<tool_call>{"name": "search", "arguments": {"querys": ["largest city in Switzerland"]}}</tool_call>
[User] <tool_response>{"results": [{"title": "ZΓΌrich - Wikipedia", ...}]}</tool_response>
[Asst] <think>ZΓΌrich is the largest city. Now let me find its population...</think>
<tool_call>{"name": "visit", "arguments": {"urls": ["..."], "goal": "population of ZΓΌrich"}}</tool_call>
[User] <tool_response>{"found": true, "content": "Population: 434,335 (2024)"}</tool_response>
[Asst] <think>I found the answer with a reliable source...</think>
<answer>The largest city in Switzerland is ZΓΌrich, with a population of approximately 434,335.</answer>Quick Start
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import json
from datetime import datetime
model_name = "AIDC-AI/Marco-DeepResearch-8B"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
model_name,
torch_dtype="auto",
device_map="auto",
trust_remote_code=True,
)
# 1. Define tools (OpenAI function calling format)
tools = [
{
"type": "function",
"function": {
"name": "search",
"description": "Search the web via Google to find relevant information and URLs.",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"querys": {
"type": "array",
"items": {"type": "string"},
"description": "Search queries for finding relevant information. Supports single or multiple queries."
}
},
"required": ["querys"]
}
}
},
{
"type": "function",
"function": {
"name": "visit",
"description": "Read webpage content to extract specific information, verify claims, or understand context.",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"urls": {
"type": "array",
"items": {"type": "string"},
"description": "URL(s) to visit. Supports single or multiple urls."
},
"goal": {
"type": "string",
"description": "The specific information to retrieve. Be precise, not vague."
}
},
"required": ["urls", "goal"]
}
}
}
]
# 2. Build system prompt
ROLE_PROMPT = """You are an expert web researcher. Your task is to find accurate, complete answers through iterative search, extraction, and verification.
## Core Principles
1) Strategic Planning
- Decompose complex questions into targeted sub-tasks
- Choose the right tool for each step
- Refine your approach based on what you learn
2) Precise Execution
- Define clear objectives before using any tool
- Provide sufficient detail for accurate results
- Avoid vague or overly broad requests
3) Rigorous Verification
- Cross-check important facts across multiple sources
- Resolve conflicts by gathering additional evidence
- Only conclude when evidence is sufficient and consistent
## Output Format
In each turn, you can either call a tool or provide the final answer.
**Call a tool:**
<think>your reasoning process</think>
<tool_call>
{"name": "tool_name", "arguments": {"param1": "value1", "param2": "value2"}}
</tool_call>
**Provide final answer (when you have gathered enough information):**
<think>your reasoning and analysis</think>
<answer>the direct answer to the question</answer>
Note: All reasoning should be in <think>, <answer> should contain only the final answer."""
current_date = datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
tools_json = "\n".join([json.dumps(t, ensure_ascii=False) for t in tools])
system_prompt = f"""{ROLE_PROMPT}
Current date: {current_date}
# Tools
You may call one or more functions to assist with the user query.
You are provided with function signatures within <tools></tools> XML tags:
<tools>
{tools_json}
</tools>
For each function call, return a json object with function name and arguments within <tool_call></tool_call> XML tags:
<tool_call>
{{"name": <function-name>, "arguments": <args-json-object>}}
</tool_call>"""
# 3. Build messages and generate
messages = [
{"role": "system", "content": system_prompt},
{"role": "user", "content": "Who won the 2026 Turing Award?"},
]
text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = tokenizer([text], return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=16384, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.95)
response = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][inputs.input_ids.shape[-1]:], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(response)For the full multi-turn agent loop, see the GitHub repository.
Benchmark Results
Evaluated on a suite of deep search benchmarks under a maximum budget of 600 tool calls.
<p align="center"> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-DeepResearch/refs/heads/main/Marco-DeepResearch-Family/Marco-Agent-DeepResearch/assets/benchmarkchartv2.png" alt="Marco DeepResearch benchmark performance across BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, xBench-DeepSearch-2510, and GAIA (text-only)" width="100%" /> </p>
\* marks scores we reproduced with our own implementation; other scores are from the respective official reports.
Intended Use
Marco DeepResearch is designed for:
- Open-ended web research β Autonomously investigating complex questions across multiple web sources
- Multi-hop question answering β Solving questions that require chaining information from multiple documents
- Information seeking β Navigating the web to locate specific, hard-to-find information
- Fact verification β Verifying claims through multi-source evidence aggregation
Limitations
- Performance depends on the quality and accessibility of external web search tools and APIs.
- The model is optimized for information-seeking tasks and may not generalize to all types of reasoning tasks.
- Enabling test-time scaling introduces extra inference overhead; the number of tool-call rounds can be tuned based on the use case.
Citation
@article{zhu2026marco,
title={Marco DeepResearch: Unlocking Efficient Deep Research Agents via Verification-Centric Design},
author={Bin Zhu and Qianghuai Jia and Tian Lan and Junyang Ren and Feng Gu and Feihu Jiang and Longyue Wang and Zhao Xu and Weihua Luo},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.28376},
year={2026}
}License
This model is released under the Apache 2.0 License.
