Search-G1 is a reward framework that encourages language agents to retrieve external information only when necessary and to ground their answers in that evidence. It uses two hidden‑state readouts—one predicting whether a closed‑book answer suffices and another measuring sensitivity to evidence deletion—to calibrate retrieval necessity and evidence reliance. The reward system gates evidence credit by necessity, rewards sufficient direct answers, and penalizes redundant searches, all without requiring costly annotations or LLM‑judge inference.
arXiv:2608. 07531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search-augmented language agents should retrieve external information only when necessary and ground their answers in retrieved evidence.
arXiv:2608. 06128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search agents extend large language models beyond static parametric memory by enabling them to acquire and use ex ternal evidence during multi-step reasoning.
The paper introduces Grounded Credit Assignment (GCA) for reinforcement learning in multi‑turn search agents. GCA separates credit for evidence retrieval and answer correctness, correcting the bias in GRPO that favors evidence‑retrieving rollouts only proportionally to accuracy gains. Applying GCA to Search‑R1 boosts average EM by 5.7–6.3 points and increases the proportion of evidence‑supported correct answers from 76.9% to 93.4%.
arXiv:2608.01822v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training LLM-based search agents requires high-quality search data: tasks that demand genuine multi-hop retrieval and trajectories that use search...
The paper introduces RAG‑Stress, a diagnostic protocol that tests how retrieval‑augmented generation models handle misleading evidence. By fixing the question and reference answer, editing a single assertion to support an incorrect answer, and varying source‑priority policies and evidence positions, the study measures misleading rate (MR) and clean accuracy across fifteen systems on multiple QA datasets. Results show that prioritizing documents increases MR by 10.9–13.5 percentage points, with the highest MR when the misleading span appears at the end of the evidence.
Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult. Existing approache...
arXiv:2608. 16156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult.
arXiv:2606. 02373v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search agents are often trained as policies over growing transcripts: the model must decide how to search while also remembering what it has seen, which evidence is useful, which constraints remain open, and which claims have actually been checked.
The paper introduces matched trajectory replay, a protocol that fixes answer states, evidence points, budgets, and action costs to evaluate how confidence signals influence agent actions. Using this method, the authors compare raw verbalized confidence with post‑hoc isotonic calibration across six model‑dataset pairs, finding that calibration can significantly improve accuracy of committed answers but may reduce coverage and increase retrieval usage. The study concludes that calibration helps interpret commitment risk but does not predict the benefit of additional retrieval, indicating the need for separate value‑of‑information estimates.
arXiv:2608. 05102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon search agents must make multiple sequential actions (steps) to search, retrieve, verify, and integrate evidence to reach a final answer.
DynaKRAG is a unified framework that learns a state‑conditioned policy to control evidence acquisition in multi‑hop retrieval‑augmented generation. It uses a deterministic validity layer to build an action set, a learned continuation gate to decide between generating an answer or gathering more evidence, and an advantage scorer to rank evidence operations by predicted gain. Across HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and MuSiQue with various backbone models, DynaKRAG achieves top EM and F1 scores, improves token and retrieval efficiency, and enables terminal evidence compression that reduces context size while boosting answer quality.
arXiv:2607. 10463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends static RAG by allowing language models to iteratively reason, generate search queries, retrieve evidence, and predict answers.