arXiv AI

Learning to Reason by Analogy via Retrieval-Augmented Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606. 13680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a standard mechanism for grounding language models in external knowledge, yet conventional retrieval based on lexical or semantic similarity is poorly suited for complex reasoning tasks: a semantically similar problem may demand an entirely different solution strategy, while a superficially different problem may share the same underlying reasoning pattern.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Correct Is Not Enough: Training Reasoning Planners with Executor-Grounded Rewards

arXiv:2605. 03862v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it.

By Tianyang Han, Hengyu Shi, Junjie Hu, Xu Yang, Zhiling Wang, Junhao Su
arXiv AI
Jun 16

RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving external knowledge is essential for solving real-world tasks, yet it remains challenging when the relationship between a query and its relevant knowledge involves implicit and complex reasoning beyond surface-level semantic or lexical matching (e.

By Yongjia Lei, Nedim Lipka, Zhisheng Qi, Utkarsh Sahu, Koustava Goswami, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Yu Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 3

UR$^2$: Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2508. 06165v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge grounding and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for complex reasoning.

By Weitao Li, Boran Xiang, Xiaolong Wang, Zhinan Gou, Weizhi Ma, Yang Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Learning to Reason with Curriculum I: Provable Benefits of Autocurriculum

The paper investigates whether the high costs of training chain-of-thought reasoning models can be reduced through algorithmic design. It introduces an autocurriculum approach that lets the model select which problems to focus on during training, showing that this method provably improves both supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning. For supervised fine‑tuning, autocurriculum requires exponentially fewer reasoning demonstrations by targeting prompts where the model struggles, while for reinforcement learning it decouples computational cost from the quality of the reference model, making the burn‑in cost nearly independent of target accuracy.

By Nived Rajaraman, Audrey Huang, Miro Dudik, Robert Schapire, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Good Reasoning Makes Good Demonstrations: Implicit Reasoning Quality Supervision via In-Context Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603. 09803v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models but treats all correct solutions equally, potentially reinforcing flawed traces that arrive at correct answers by chance.

By Tiehua Mei, Minxuan Lv, Leiyu Pan, Zhenpeng Su, Hongru Hou, Hengrui Chen, Ao Xu, Deqing Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

OPDSearch+: On-Policy Distillation with RL Refinement for Search-Augmented Reasoning

OPDSearch+ introduces a two‑stage distillation framework for search‑augmented reasoning that eliminates the need for task‑specific teacher fine‑tuning. In the first stage, a frozen off‑the‑shelf instruct model guides a student through live search interactions using a per‑position forward KL objective, transferring reasoning decomposition and evidence integration skills. The second stage refines this student with reinforcement learning, achieving performance surpassing RL alone and outperforming all prior 3B‑parameter baselines on seven QA benchmarks, including 13.1% improvement on HotpotQA and 8.5% on 2WikiMultihopQA.

By Qinglin Ye, Zhiyuan Gu, Jingjie Xia, Yiheng Zhang, Kaiyan Zhao, Shunchao Zheng, Yuhang Mu, Wenchao Du, Yiming 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.