Nomad: Autonomous Exploration and Discovery

TL;DR

Nomad is an autonomous exploration system that systematically investigates data sources to generate trustworthy, diverse insights and reports, surpassing traditional question-driven methods.

Contribution

It introduces an exploration-first architecture with an explicit Exploration Map and a comprehensive evaluation framework for autonomous discovery systems.

Findings

Nomad produces more trustworthy reports than baselines.

It generates higher-quality insights and more diversity.

Nomad outperforms in producing comprehensive, unbiased reports.

Abstract

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.