Static-DRA: A Hierarchical Tree-based approach for creating Configurable and Static Deep Research Agent
A configurable and hierarchical tree-based static Deep Research Agent designed to overcome the limitations of standard RAG pipelines for complex, multi-turn research tasks.
The Static Deep Research Agent (Static-DRA) introduces a novel approach to autonomous research by utilizing a static workflow governed by two user-tunable parameters: Depth and Breadth. Unlike dynamic workflows that can spiral in cost and complexity, Static-DRA allows users to explicitly balance the desired quality/comprehensiveness of the research against the computational cost (LLM tokens).
This architecture employs a hierarchical team of agents—Supervisor, Independent, and Worker—to facilitate multi-hop information retrieval and parallel sub-topic investigation.
The system operates on a hierarchical tree structure where a primary research topic is decomposed into sub-topics based on the configured parameters.
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Supervisor Agent: Determines if a research topic can/should be split further. It consults the LLM to decide if the current node requires decomposition or direct research.
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Independent Agent: Acts as a middle-manager. If a topic is split, it spawns child Supervisor agents for every sub-topic and aggregates their results.
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Worker Agent: The leaf node of the tree. It performs the actual deep research using:
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LLM (Reasoning): Currently evaluated with gemini-2.5-pro.
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Web Search Tool: Uses Tavily API to fetch relevant citations (filtering for relevance scores > 30%).
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The expansion of the research tree is controlled by the Depth (d) and Breadth (b) parameters.
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Depth: How many levels deep the agent recursively breaks down topics.
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Breadth: The maximum number of sub-topics spawned from a single parent topic.
Below are the evaluation metrics for Static-DRA at multiple configurations.
Note: The effective breadth decreases by a factor of 2 at each deeper level to focus resources on the most relevant core topics.
We evaluated Static-DRA against the DeepResearch Bench using the RACE (Reference-based Adaptive Criteria-driven Evaluation) framework.
Configuration:
- Model:
gemini-2.5-pro - Depth:
2 - Breadth:
5
| Metric | Overall Score | Comprehensiveness | Insight | Instruction Following | Readability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 2.5 Pro DeepResearch | 49.71 | 49.51 | 49.45 | 50.12 | 50 |
| OpenAI Deep Research | 46.45 | 46.46 | 43.73 | 49.39 | 47.22 |
| Claude Research | 45.00 | 45.34 | 42.79 | 47.58 | 44.66 |
| Static-DRA (Ours) | 34.72 | 35.12 | 30.45 | 38.86 | 35.44 |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro-preview-05-06 | 31.9 | 31.75 | 24.61 | 40.24 | 32.76 |
| GPT-4o Search Preview | 30.74 | 27.81 | 20.44 | 41.01 | 37.6 |
| Sonar | 30.64 | 27.14 | 21.62 | 40.7 | 37.46 |
| Metric | Score |
|---|---|
| Overall | 34.72 |
| Comprehensiveness | 35.12 |
| Insight | 30.45 |
| Instruction Following | 38.86 |
| Readability | 35.44 |
If you refer or use Static Deep Research Agent (Static-DRA) in your research, please cite my paper:
@misc{prateek2025hierarchicaltreebasedapproachcreating,
title={A Hierarchical Tree-based approach for creating Configurable and Static Deep Research Agent (Static-DRA)},
author={Saurav Prateek},
year={2025},
eprint={2512.03887},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.AI},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03887},
}

