The paper investigates how trajectory fine‑tuning can enhance small language models (SLMs) as next‑action controllers in retrieval‑augmented question answering. By building a seven‑way action‑prediction task from teacher search traces, the authors fine‑tune SLMs and cross‑lingual SLMs (xSLMs) using LoRA and evaluate on 1,646 held‑out examples, achieving a macro‑F1 of 0.6536 with Granite 4.1 3B. In an end‑to‑end controller/generator swap experiment on 149 trajectories, the fine‑tuned model improves Exact Match from 0.7530 to 0.7946 and token F1 from 0.7783 to 0.8295, demonstrating that trajectory supervision boosts action prediction and evidence‑recording behavior.
By Mohammed Al-Maamari, Saber Zerhoudi, Michael Granitzer, Jelena Mitrovi\'c
arXiv:2605. 09038v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Teaching language models to use search tools is not only a question of whether they search, but also of whether they issue good queries.
By Jinchao Hu, Meizhi Zhong, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang
arXiv:2607. 25600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation.
By Chandan Kumar Sah, Xiaoli Lian, Li Zhang
The paper introduces a search‑aware reinforcement learning framework for multi‑component query understanding in Roblox game search. It first uses teacher‑student supervised fine‑tuning to create a schema‑compliant policy, then applies reinforcement learning that optimizes each query‑understanding component with component‑specific rewards derived from live search engine interactions. Experiments show that this approach improves per‑component utility and overall search quality, raising NDCG@20 by 8.9 points over the supervised baseline and 3.5 points over a single end‑to‑end reward strategy.
By Nayoung Choi, Shengjian Chen, Xiaokai Wei, Wenzheng Zhang, Daiyao Yi, Rachit Pareek, Vincent Su, Michelle Gong, Jinho D. Choi
Retrieval-augmented generation improves knowledge-intensive question answering, but indiscriminate retrieval can introduce irrelevant evidence and unnecessary computation. We investigate whether verbalized confidence from black-box language models can serve as an actionable signal for retrieval routing.
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.
By Cheng Ruoxi, Ma Haoxuan, Zhang Hongyi, Zhang Junming, Duan Ranjie, Xia Qiaolin, Wang Hao, Lu Yu, Shi Haibo, Ma Xingjun
arXiv:2510. 08048v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Query-product relevance prediction is fundamental to e-commerce search and has become even more critical in the era of AI-powered shopping, where semantic understanding and complex reasoning directly shape the user experience and business conversion.
By Jianhui Yang, Yiming Jin, Pengkun Jiao, Chenhe Dong, Zerui Huang, Shaowei Yao, Xiaojiang Zhou, Dan Ou, Haihong Tang
SEEK (Skill‑Routed Evaluation with Evolvable Knowledge) is a framework that externalizes search evaluation criteria into a skill bank, dynamically routes relevant skills for each query‑result pair, and uses a task‑adapted listwise evaluator to generate page‑level judgments and failure‑mode attribution. It employs a two‑stage training pipeline to align evaluation with human preferences and a replay‑gated skill bank to incorporate new evaluation knowledge without retraining the model. Experiments on industrial short‑video search demonstrate that SEEK improves listwise quality evaluation accuracy and significantly advances attribution diagnosis, leading to its deployment at Kuaishou with over 400 million daily active users.
By Zhongxin Huang, Songyang Li, Renzhe Zhou, Feiran Zhu, Chenglei Dai, Zhen Xiao, Xuanping Li, Jingwei Zhuo
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.
By Pengcheng Jiang, Zhiyi Shi, Kelly Hong, Xueqiang Xu, Jiashuo Sun, Jimeng Sun, Hammad Bashir, Jiawei Han
Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.
By Deqiang Huang, Jingbo Zhou, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Hua Wu, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2511.05933v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving reasoning at the expense of factual knowledge. We instead find that reasoning mo...
By Renfei Zhang, Manasa Kaniselvan, Rylan Schaeffer, Niloofar Mireshghallah
The study evaluates whether learned context planning can outperform strong retrieval methods in long-context multiple-choice question answering. Using 503 LongBench-v2 MCQ questions and a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct model, the planner—trained on outcome-selected traces—achieves lower accuracy than anchored hybrid retrieval and BM25 across various character budgets. Even with tight budgets, the planner only marginally improves or matches retrieval, indicating that learned planning provides a weak relevance signal rather than a replacement for robust retrieval.
By Yingrui Li, Han Chen