Nomad: Autonomous Exploration and Discovery

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 31 Mar 2026] Nomad: Autonomous Exploration and Discovery Bokang Jia, Samta Kamboj, Satheesh Katipomu, Seung Hun Han, Neha Sengupta, Andrew Jackson We introduce Nomad, a system for autonomous data exploration and insight discovery. Given a corpus of documents, databases, or other data sources, users rarely know the full set of questions, hypotheses, or connections that could be explored. As a result, query-driven question answering and prompt-driven deep-research systems remain limited by human framing and often fail to cover the broader insight space. Nomad addresses this problem with an exploration-first architecture. It constructs an explicit Exploration Map over the domain and systematically traverses it to balance breadth and depth. It generates and selects hypotheses and investigates them with an explorer agent that can use document search, web search, and database tools. Candidate insights are then checked by an independent verifier before entering a reporting pipeline that produces cited reports and higher-level meta-reports. We also present a comprehensive evaluation framework for autonomous discovery systems that measures trustworthiness, report quality, and diversity. Using a corpus of selected UN and WHO reports, we show that \nomad{} produces more trustworthy and higher-quality reports than baselines, while also producing more diverse insights over several runs. Nomad is a step toward autonomous systems that not only answer user questions or conduct directed research, but also discover which questions, research directions, and insights are worth surfacing in the first place. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.29353 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.29353v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.29353 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Neha Sengupta [view email] [v1] Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:26:25 UTC (3,142 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)