academic digital libraries

Abstract: Complex documents such as scientific papers contain rich information in tables, figures, and equations; however, existing deep research (DR) agents typically reduce papers to OCR-extracted text. We instead ask whether vision-language models (VLMs) can enable page-native deep research: directly retrieving and reasoning over rendered document page images. We introduce DR Pixel, the first open-source end-to-end multimodal DR agent that uses rendered page images as its sole retrieval and reasoning unit, operating over a corpus of 1.06M pages. To evaluate this setting, we construct DRPixelBench, a benchmark on scientific papers requiring reasoning over text, figures, tables, and equations. Surprisingly, page-native DR already works well without training, outperforming OCR-based baselines across state-of-the-art models like GPT-5.4, Gemini-3.5-Flash, and Qwen3.6-27B, while requiring fewer tool calls. We next turn to DR training. A key challenge is that teacher trajectories for agentic supervised finetuning are noisy, mixing critical reasoning and action steps with redundant or failed attempts. To address this, we introduce counterfactual credit reweighting, a fine-grained credit assignment method that weights individual reasoning and action steps by their counterfactual contribution to the final answer. Our training improves retrieval recall by about 15 points and final accuracy by over 10 points on DRPixelBench, and likewise outperforms the untrained baseline on four existing benchmarks. On out-of-distribution ViDoRe-V3, DR Pixel comes within 1.8 points of an oracle that is given the gold pages directly. Our results suggest that the conventional OCR-then-retrieve pipeline is not only unnecessary but suboptimal: directly retrieving and reasoning over visual document pages makes complex DR both more effective and more efficient.

Abstract: This study investigates the effectiveness of large pre-trained language models (LLMs) for knowledge entity relation extraction (KERE) from academic papers. Existing studies have examined individual types of LLM-based strategies and evaluated model performance using metrics such as precision and recall. To provide a broader evaluation, this study investigates multiple strategies, including closed-source LLM-based CoT prompting, LoRA-adapted open-source LLMs, LLM-enhanced small pre-trained language models (SLMs), and SLM-enhanced closed-source LLMs. In addition, this study introduces two strategies, namely SLM-enhanced open-source LLMs and closed-source LLM-enhanced open-source LLMs. These strategies are evaluated from multiple perspectives, including metrics, their ability to mitigate errors observed in SLMs, and potential directions for model optimization. This study manually constructs two annotated datasets in the NLP domain, covering Abstract and Full-Text datasets. Experimental results show that the LoRA-adapted T5 model achieves the highest macro F1 scores of 0.7408 and 0.7013 on the Abstract and Full-Text datasets, respectively. SLMs also benefit from LLM-generated entity descriptions under the LLM-enhanced SLM strategy. Error analysis further reveals that the effectiveness of LLM-based strategies in mitigating SLM errors varies across error types. Based on the identified limitations and error patterns of these strategies, several optimization directions are proposed. In addition, combining strategies with different error patterns further improves KERE performance.

Abstract: Hallucinated citations make it harder to trace sources and verify the evidence behind scientific claims. Detecting them is difficult because bibliographic records can be incomplete or differ across source types and publication versions. A plausible match alone neither validates the citation nor establishes its underlying source. We introduce CiteResolve, a benchmark of 423 real-world hallucinated citations annotated for source recoverability. We further propose CiteAnchor, a source-aware grounding framework that adapts retrieval and field-level verification to each source type and separately determines citation validity and whether a unique source can be recovered. On an existing detection benchmark, CiteAnchor achieves 0.841 F1 with GPT-5.6 Luna and 0.784 with an open-weight backbone, outperforming the baseline with the same backbones by 7.9 and 36.8 points. On CiteResolve, it achieves 74.7% and 70.7% end-to-end task success, outperforming the corresponding web search baselines by 16.3 and 65.3 percentage points. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/oldwizard7/CiteANCHOR_code.