AutoResearchBench is a new benchmark showing top AI agents achieve under 10% success on complex scientific literature discovery tasks that demand deep comprehension and open-ended search.
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Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning
78 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Efficiently acquiring external knowledge and up-to-date information is essential for effective reasoning and text generation in large language models (LLMs). Prompting advanced LLMs with reasoning capabilities to use search engines during inference is often suboptimal, as the LLM might not fully possess the capability on how to interact optimally with the search engine. This paper introduces Search-R1, an extension of reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning frameworks where the LLM learns to autonomously generate (multiple) search queries during step-by-step reasoning with real-time retrieval. Search-R1 optimizes LLM reasoning trajectories with multi-turn search interactions, leveraging retrieved token masking for stable RL training and a simple outcome-based reward function. Experiments on seven question-answering datasets show that Search-R1 improves performance by 41% (Qwen2.5-7B) and 20% (Qwen2.5-3B) over various RAG baselines under the same setting. This paper further provides empirical insights into RL optimization methods, LLM choices, and response length dynamics in retrieval-augmented reasoning. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Search-R1.
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- abstract Efficiently acquiring external knowledge and up-to-date information is essential for effective reasoning and text generation in large language models (LLMs). Prompting advanced LLMs with reasoning capabilities to use search engines during inference is often suboptimal, as the LLM might not fully possess the capability on how to interact optimally with the search engine. This paper introduces Search-R1, an extension of reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning frameworks where the LLM learns to autonomously generate (multiple) search queries during step-by-step reasoning with real-time retrieva
co-cited works
representative citing papers
PyRAG turns multi-hop reasoning into executable Python code over retrieval tools for explicit, verifiable step-by-step RAG.
ActGuide-RL uses human action data as plan-style guidance in mixed-policy RL to overcome exploration barriers in LLM agents, matching SFT+RL performance on search benchmarks without cold-start training.
Evolving-RL jointly optimizes experience extraction and utilization in LLM agents via RL with separate evaluation signals, delivering up to 98.7% relative gains on out-of-distribution tasks in ALFWorld and Mind2Web.
DeepRefine refines agent-compiled knowledge bases via multi-turn abductive diagnosis and RL training with a GBD reward, yielding consistent downstream task gains.
LLMs encode tool necessity in pre-generation hidden states at AUROC 0.89-0.96, enabling Probe&Prefill to reduce tool calls 48% with 1.7% accuracy loss, outperforming prompt and reasoning baselines.
AHD Agent trains a 4B-parameter LLM via agentic RL to actively use tools for automatic heuristic design, matching or exceeding larger baselines across eight domains with fewer evaluations.
AgentForesight trains a 7B model to perform online auditing of multi-agent LLM trajectories, detecting early decisive errors and outperforming larger models on custom and external benchmarks.
The cancellation hypothesis shows how rollout-level rewards produce token-level credit assignment in critic-free RL through cancellation of opposing signals on shared tokens, with empirical support and batching interventions that enhance performance.
AIDA is the first end-to-end autonomous agent that combines a domain-specific language with Pareto-guided reinforcement learning to discover insights from complex business data.
A VOI-based controller for dual inference budgets improves multi-hop QA performance by prioritizing search actions and selectively finalizing answers.
Agents improve when they retrieve skills on demand from large corpora, yet current models cannot selectively decide when to load or ignore a retrieved skill.
MAGEO is a multi-agent system that distills validated editing patterns into reusable optimization skills for generative engines, outperforming heuristic baselines on visibility and fidelity via a new benchmark and evaluation protocol.
LAnR unifies retrieval-augmented generation inside a single LLM by deriving dense retrieval vectors from a [PRED] token's hidden states and using entropy to adaptively stop retrieval, outperforming prior RAG on six QA benchmarks with better efficiency.
Deep-Reporter introduces a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation via multimodal search, checklist-guided synthesis, and recurrent context management, plus the M2LongBench benchmark.
Agentic search narrows the gap between dense RAG and GraphRAG but does not remove GraphRAG's advantage on complex multi-hop reasoning.
GiGPO adds a hierarchical grouping mechanism to group-based RL so that LLM agents receive both global trajectory and local step-level credit signals, yielding >12% gains on ALFWorld and >9% on WebShop over GRPO while keeping the same rollout and memory footprint.
ReflectMT internalizes reflection via two-stage RL to enable direct high-quality machine translation that outperforms explicit reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 on WMT24 while using 94% fewer tokens.
Freshness-Aware PER augments prioritized experience replay with exponential age decay based on effective sample size to enable successful reuse of trajectories in LLM and VLM reinforcement learning, outperforming on-policy baselines on agentic tasks.
RL expands the capability boundary of LLM agents on compositional tool-use tasks, shown by non-converging pass curves at large k with increasing T, while SFT regresses it and the effect is absent on simpler tasks.
A single query-specific poisoned document, built by extracting and iteratively refining an adversarial chain-of-thought, can substantially degrade reasoning accuracy in retrieval-augmented LLM systems.
COVERT generates verifiable synthetic tool-use environments for RL by validated trajectory synthesis and oracle-preserving augmentations, improving tool-use accuracy on BFCL v3 and ACEBench while remaining complementary to SFT.
VISOR is a unified agentic VRAG framework with Evidence Space structuring, visual action evaluation/correction, and dynamic sliding-window trajectories trained via GRPO-based RL that achieves SOTA performance on long-horizon visual reasoning benchmarks.
RAR retrieves candidate items from a 300k-movie corpus then uses LLM generation with RL feedback to produce context-aware recommendations that outperform baselines on benchmarks.
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