Agent

Summary

AI research tools today are often narrow: one generates summaries, another ranks models, a third suggests ideas. But real scientific discovery isn’t a single step—it’s a pipeline. It’s iterative, structured, and full of feedback loops.

In this post, I show how to build a modular AI system that mirrors this full research lifecycle. From initial idea generation to method planning, each phase is handled by a specialized agent working in concert.

Summary

In this post, we’ll build a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) tool to process the PDF files downloaded from arXiv in the previous post DeepResearch Part 1. This RAG tool will be capable of loading, processing, and semantically searching the document content. It’s a versatile tool applicable to various text sources, including web pages.

Building the RAG Tool

Following up on our arXiv downloader, we now need a tool to process the downloaded PDF’s. This post details the creation of such a tool.

Summary

This post kicks off a series of three where we’ll build, extend, and use the open-source DeepResearch application inspired by the Hugging Face blog post. In this first part, we’ll focus on creating an arXiv search tool that can be used with SmolAgents.

DeepResearch aims to empower research by providing tools that automate and streamline the process of discovering and managing academic papers. This series will demonstrate how to build such tools, starting with a powerful arXiv search tool.