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.
arXiv:2606. 03135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents often operate under underspecified user instructions, where latent uncertainty over user intent leads to erroneous tool actions.
The paper introduces VAKE, a two‑stage reinforcement‑learning framework that activates latent factual knowledge in large language models. In the Priming stage, the model explicitly inserts bridging triples into an insufficient subgraph, guided by rewards from a frozen model’s answers. The Reasoning stage then trains the model to answer from the original input, demonstrating that the elicitation capability transfers to implicit reasoning and consistently outperforms baselines across multiple benchmarks and model sizes.
arXiv:2607.28077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but prompt groups with identica...
The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.
arXiv:2605.25831v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling...
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but prompt groups with identical rollout rewards consume generation budget without effective learning signals. Pre-rollout prompt selection can reduce this waste by screening prompts before rollout generation.
ConfRAG introduces a confidence-guided approach to reduce hallucinations in large language models and selectively trigger Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) only when the model is uncertain. The ConfQA fine‑tuning strategy trains the model to answer correctly or respond with "I am unsure," achieving a drop in hallucination rates from 20‑40% to below 5% across factuality benchmarks. Building on ConfQA, ConfRAG limits external retrievals by more than 30% while maintaining over 95% accuracy in ideal scenarios.
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.
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:2605.20066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graph question answering seeks to translate natural language questions into executable queries over knowledge graphs, but existing approa...
arXiv:2609.27987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made substantial progress on medical question-answering, yet effective medical dialogue also requires learning to ask...