arXiv AI

Effective Reinforcement Learning for Agentic Search by Recycling Zero-Variance Queries During Training

arXiv:2606. 10709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The use of GRPO-style algorithms has become the standard strategy for training LLM search agents under outcome-only rewards.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Beyond the Stability-Exploration Dilemma: Environmental Regularization for LLM Policy Optimization

arXiv:2608.23311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability--exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer...

By Xianlei Zhou, Xiangdi Meng, Yu He, Tianyu Qi, Shuyan Guan, Xianli Zhang, Jian Zhang, Xin Li, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 2

One Policy, Any Budget: Internalizing Budget-Aware Search via Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces AnySearch, a reinforcement‑learning framework that trains a single policy to perform budget‑aware search for large language models under any budget constraint. The training proceeds in two phases: first, the agent learns with explicit budget state injection and structured reasoning prompts under linearly decaying budgets; second, the scaffold is removed and the agent adapts to randomly sampled budgets that match deployment conditions. The reward combines answer accuracy and budget efficiency, with adaptive weighting to emphasize efficiency for high‑accuracy queries and reduce it for low‑accuracy ones. Experiments on seven QA benchmarks demonstrate that AnySearch outperforms baselines across all budget scales, generalizes to unseen constraints, and improves tool productivity without excessive token overhead.

By Xiaowei Sun, Jin Li, Yili Hong, Yikun Fu, Yanghua Xiao
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

More Methods, Better Agents? A Reality Check on Self-Distillation in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2610.19789v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-distillation in agentic reinforcement learning has produced a growing number of methods. However, existing evaluations often reuse published bas...

By Linhao Zhong, Bozhen Fang, Xuehao Wang, Duochao Shi, Zekai Luo, Guangming Yao, Yi Yuan, Hao Chen, Jingdong Chen, Chunhua Shen
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