Self-Consistency of Entity Sets and Citations in a Deep Research System under Repeated Prompting

arXiv:2610.26421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents (DRA) are commonly used for open-ended synthesis tasks where closed-world QA benchmarks are poorly suited to characterize relevant aspects of performance. We study the self-consistency of one commercial deep research system under repeated identical prompting, representing each report with the set of named entities it mentions, categorised by a custom schema, and the set of citations it retrieves. Across repeated runs of a single open-ended cybersecurity related prompt, we quantify pairwise overlap to characterize how stable the retrieved and synthesized output structure is under repeated identical prompts. In ten runs, the pairwise entity Jaccard results in a median of 0.12 and the pairwise citation Jaccard is below 0.02, with discovery curves that do not visibly saturate. The magnitude and structure of (dis)agreement between entity sets varies by entity class, which suggests that self-consistency in a DRA is better understood as a function of the underlying entity space than as a stable property of the system.