Model-Document Protocol for AI Search

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Model-Document Protocol (MDP), a new framework for transforming raw, unstructured documents into structured, task-specific knowledge representations to improve AI search with large language models.

Contribution

The paper proposes the MDP framework that formalizes multiple pathways for converting raw documents into LLM-ready inputs, including agentic reasoning, memory grounding, and structured leveraging, with an instantiation called MDP-Agent.

Findings

MDP-Agent outperforms baselines on information-seeking benchmarks.

The framework effectively bridges raw documents and LLM reasoning.

Structured knowledge representations enhance AI search capabilities.

Abstract

AI search depends on linking large language models (LLMs) with vast external knowledge sources. Yet web pages, PDF files, and other raw documents are not inherently LLM-ready: they are long, noisy, and unstructured. Conventional retrieval methods treat these documents as verbatim text and return raw passages, leaving the burden of fragment assembly and contextual reasoning to the LLM. This gap underscores the need for a new retrieval paradigm that redefines how models interact with documents. We introduce the Model-Document Protocol (MDP), a general framework that formalizes how raw text is bridged to LLMs through consumable knowledge representations. Rather than treating retrieval as passage fetching, MDP defines multiple pathways that transform unstructured documents into task-specific, LLM-ready inputs. These include agentic reasoning, which curates raw evidence into coherent context; memory grounding, which accumulates reusable notes to enrich reasoning; and structured leveraging, which encodes documents into formal representations such as graphs or key-value caches. All three pathways share the same goal: ensuring that what reaches the LLM is not raw fragments but compact, structured knowledge directly consumable for reasoning. As an instantiation, we present MDP-Agent, which realizes the protocol through an agentic process: constructing document-level gist memories for global coverage, performing diffusion-based exploration with vertical exploitation to uncover layered dependencies, and applying map-reduce style synthesis to integrate large-scale evidence into compact yet sufficient context. Experiments on information-seeking benchmarks demonstrate that MDP-Agent outperforms baselines, validating both the soundness of the MDP framework and the effectiveness of its agentic instantiation.