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.
By Yijun Lu, Rui Ye, Jiajun Wang, Yuwen Du, Tian Jin, Songhua Liu, Siheng Chen
arXiv:2608. 12764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep search agents operate over trajectories spanning dozens of steps, yet standard reinforcement learning provides only a single outcome reward per trajectory, which is far too sparse for effective credit assignment.
By Haoze Wu, Chuqiao Kuang, Tianyi Zhuang, Xiaoguang Li
arXiv:2610.05107v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Search agents repeatedly make short decisions about relevance, evidence sufficiency, and search actions. Using generative language models for...
By Congfeng Cao, Lipeng Zuo, Konstantinos Papakostas, Qiwei Xu, Songwei Xu, Qianru Meng, Lun Zhou, Zhaochun Ren, Yougang Lyu, Xiaohui Yan
AdaSearch introduces a two‑stage reinforcement learning framework that separates problem solving from the decision to search in large language models. By using an F1‑based decision metric, it explicitly evaluates when external search is needed, reducing unnecessary search calls while maintaining high question‑answering performance. Experiments show that AdaSearch improves search‑decision quality with only a minor impact on accuracy compared to always‑search strategies.
By Tzu-Han Lin, Wei-Lin Chen, Chen-An Li, Hung-yi Lee, Yun-Nung Chen, Yu Meng
The paper identifies a flaw in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) called the spurious advantage, where the advantage estimator can incorrectly reward rollouts that reach correct answers by guessing rather than reasoning. This issue appears in bounded-answer tasks, open-answer sets with bounded sub-cases, and search agents with many paths to the same answer. The authors propose SIGNBALANCE, a new magnitude estimator that removes composition, maintains verifier sign, applies a global scale, and uses stop‑gradient per‑class rescaling to restore zero‑mean balance, achieving comparable or better performance on math and search benchmarks.
arXiv:2606. 07074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex information-seeking tasks, yet this power comes at a steep computational cost.
By Zequn Xie, Junjie Wang, Dan Yang, Jie Feng, Yue Shen, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu
Recent advances in equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with search tools and outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved new state-of-the-art results on open-domain QA tasks. However, we argue that current training paradigms harbor a critical vulnerability: they predominantly reward correct answers but fail to penalize fabricated ones when retrieval fails, thereby implicitly exacerbating hallucinations.
arXiv:2607. 23263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deciding whether a trajectory actually fulfills its instruction governs how we measure computer-use agents on long-horizon graphical-user-interface tasks and how we train them with reinforcement learning.
By Yang Wan, Zhenhao Zhang, Jierui Wang, Linchao Zhu
The paper introduces ZEST-Search, a zero-label framework that trains search agents by co-evolving task generation and solver learning. It constructs validated search tasks online from unlabeled questions, using a heterogeneous proposer to adapt task difficulty to the solver’s evolving capabilities. The approach rewards the proposer for intermediate difficulty and the solver for tool-aware performance, leading to improved search efficiency and accuracy across multiple question‑answering benchmarks.
By Qin-Wen Luo, Sheng Ren, Xiang Chen, Rui Liu, Jun Fang, Naiqiang Tan, Jun Wang, Hua Chai, Sheng-Jun Huang
arXiv:2606. 27291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Job-search platforms rely on low-bandwidth query interfaces that often fail to capture the high-dimensional complexity of candidate profiles.
By Ping Liu, Qianqi Shen, Jianqiang Shen, Wenqiong Liu, Rajat Arora, Yunxiang Ren, Chunnan Yao, Dan Xu, Baofen Zheng, Wanjun Jiang, Andrii Soviak, Kevin Kao, Jingwei Wu, Wenjing Zhang
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...
By Wentao Tan, Qiong Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Nan Duan
arXiv:2607. 10738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with search tools and outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved new state-of-the-art results on open-domain QA tasks.
By Fengji Zhang, Tianyu Fan, Yuxiang Zheng, Xinyao Niu, Chengen Huang, Jacky Keung, Bei Chen