arXiv AI

MetaRAG: Belief-Action Aligned Policy Optimization for Agentic RAG

MetaRAG introduces a belief-action aligned policy optimization framework for agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It incorporates Verify-first Action Generation and Internal Belief Probing to assess whether the current evidence is sufficient before taking an action, and uses a consistency reward gated by answer correctness to guide training. Experiments on seven public QA benchmarks demonstrate that MetaRAG improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off over existing RL-based agentic RAG baselines, with benefits that transfer across research settings, optimizers, and model backbones.

arXiv AI
Sep 30

BRIDGE: Bilevel Retrieval-Credit-Aware Agentic Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces BRIDGE, a bilevel optimization framework that jointly trains a large language model (LLM) and a retriever for agentic reinforcement learning (ARL). It demonstrates that adapting the retriever before the policy yields better rewards, and that BRIDGE outperforms existing methods on seven open‑domain QA benchmarks and medical QA tasks, achieving significant gains in accuracy and reasoning quality.

By Quan Xiao, Mingda Liu, Gaowen Liu, Katsuki Fujisawa, Tianyi Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 1

AgenticRag-R1: Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Stack Memory for Multi-Step Reasoning, Retrieval and Memorizing

AgenticRag‑R1 is a reinforcement‑learning framework that integrates reasoning, retrieval, and memory through a stack and fine‑grained action space. It uses hierarchical action‑aware rewards and an information‑aware trajectory rejection strategy to support long‑horizon learning. Experiments on multi‑hop, open‑domain, and agentic reasoning benchmarks show that AgenticRag‑R1 outperforms strong baselines and produces robust, interpretable, memory‑aware reasoning behaviors.

By Xinke Jiang, Yue Fang, Zhibang Yang, Jiaran Gao, Zhixin Zhang, Tao Feng, Rihong Qiu, Wentao Zhang, Hongxin Ding, Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Yuheng Huang, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 11

GRASP: GRanularity-Aware Search Policy for Agentic RAG

Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends static RAG by allowing language models to iteratively reason, generate search queries, retrieve evidence, and predict answers. However, it remains challenging for models to decide when to retrieve, whether to use lexical matching or semantic similarity, and how to control context granularity to prevent irrelevant tokens from interfering with agent reasoning.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

CAS: Conformalized Agentic Search via Adaptive Retrieval and Policy Weighting

The paper introduces Conformalized Agentic Search (CAS), a framework that applies Conformal Prediction to improve the reliability of search agents during reinforcement learning fine-tuning. CAS uses an Adaptive Prediction Set (APS) to dynamically truncate retrieved documents based on statistical coverage, and Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI) to construct confidence-aware prediction sets that penalize low‑confidence trajectories in the Group Relative Policy Optimization objective. Experiments on single‑hop and multi‑hop QA datasets show that CAS enhances reasoning accuracy and reduces redundant tool invocations, offering a more reliable and efficient agent paradigm.

By Zixi Zhu, Jiayuan Su, Jian Zhang, Yu Lin, Hongwei Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

BELIEFRAG: Making Adaptive RAG State-Aware under Evolving Evidence

BELIEFRAG is a closed‑loop controller that maintains an explicit evidence state—tracking sufficiency, reliability, conflict, uncertainty, evidence gaps, and acquisition cost—to guide adaptive retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). By updating this state, it selects among retrieval, query rewriting, verification, answering, stopping, and abstention, achieving higher token‑F1 scores and lower token usage on six QA benchmarks compared to fixed iterative retrieval. The approach shows that corrective re‑retrieval and calibrated answerability are key to its performance gains.

By Hongji Pu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12

SearchArt: Training Long-Horizon Search Agent with Scalable Synthetic and Verified Task

arXiv:2607. 24850v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled search agents to autonomously tackle complex tasks across extended search and reasoning horizons.

By Lang Mei, Xiaohan Yu, Chong Chen, Liyan Liu, Xiangnan Chen, Jinchao Ma, Chao Feng, Li Huang, Siyu Mo, Sichen Kang, Yunkun Xu, Zhihan Yang, Zhujun Xue, Jingren Zhang, Qing He, Yingdi Huang, Hao Jiang, Ziao Ma, Zewei Pan, Minhao Sun, Zhuo Tao, Jinzhao Xiao, Gangtao Xin, Huanyao Zhang, Wenjian Zhang, Jiangshan Zhang, Guojie Zhu, Fangzhou Zou, Jiaxin Mao, Wentao Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

RAG-Stress: Probing the Limits of Evidence Reliance in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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.

By Shunyuan Zhou, Hao Chen, Tianyu Wang, Goose Lin, Zaiyuan Wang, Haiying Zhao
arXiv AI
Jul 24

AREX: Towards a Recursively Self-Improving Agent for Deep Research

arXiv:2607. 21461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research requires agents to find answers that jointly satisfy multiple constraints.

By Shuqi Lu, Chaofan Li, Kun Luo, Zhang Zhang, Hui Wang, Hongwang Xiao, Zheng Liu, Lei Xiong, Jiahao Wang, Sen Wang, Xiyan Jiang, Wanli Li, Yuyang Hu, Hongjin Qian, Bingyu Yan, Ziyi Xia, Yingxia Shao, Kang Liu, Zhicheng Dou, Di He, Chaozhuo Li, Qiwei Ye, Zhongyuan Wang, Zheng Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 9

From Conflict to Consensus: Boosting Medical Reasoning via Multi-Round Agentic RAG

arXiv:2603. 03292v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit high reasoning capacity in medical question-answering, but their tendency to produce hallucinations and outdated knowledge poses critical risks in healthcare fields.

By Wenhao Wu, Zhentao Tang, Yafu Li, Shixiong Kai, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhenhong Sun, Chunlin Chen, Zhi Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

Does Faithfulness-Guided Alignment Hurt Accuracy? Unlocking Accurate and Faithful Post-Retrieval Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 01348v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions, but outcome-level rewards often leave reasoning traces weakly grounded and difficult to audit.

By Yu Liu, Wenxiao Zhang, Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Qiang Sun, Yanbing Liu, Jin B. Hong, Zhiyuan Ma