A small language model is trained via supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning to jointly perform agent selection and structured parameter generation for downstream tool calls, using a hierarchical reward function grounded in retrieval relevance along with query-agent topic alignment to learn task-dependent agent suitability from retrieval performance.
Abstract
Specialised retrieval agents typically surface higher quality results than general-purpose search, but selecting the optimal agent for a given query remains an open problem. Current approaches route queries based on inferred topic or intent, however intent-based selection is fundamentally limited: it does not incorporate signal from retrieved content, and cannot detect when a topically aligned agent produces low-relevance results. We address this by training a small language model via supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning to jointly perform agent selection and structured parameter generation for downstream tool calls, using a hierarchical reward function grounded in retrieval relevance along with query-agent topic alignment. This enables the model to learn task-dependent agent suitability from retrieval performance: which agents reliably yield high-relevance results for which query distributions, and when to redirect queries away from specialised agents despite surface-level topical overlap. On a targeted subset of such agent-query mismatches, the trained model achieves an NDCG@10 of 0.918 compared to 0.539 and 0.490 for two LLM baselines (Amazon Nova Lite and Claude Haiku 4.5) that route on intent alone. Overall, it achieves a mean NDCG@10 of 0.771 (+0.177 over Nova Lite, +0.219 over Haiku) with a mean selection latency of 120.1ms, an 82.4% reduction over Nova Lite.
Reinforcement learning (RL) search agents commonly model retrieval as free-form natural-language query generation and optimize multi-turn interactions using final-answer rewards. Current studies mainly improve training with denser or more structured credit signals, but rarely examine whether retrieval is properly formulated at the policy-environment interface. We observe pronounced retrieval aliasing during Search-R1 training: rollouts for the same question continue to generate distinct query strings, yet their accumulated evidence sets increasingly overlap. We call this phenomenon retrieval-equivalence collapse; in this regime, trajectories approach utility equivalence with respect to retrieval decisions, leaving within-group returns with little effective retrieval contrast. To address this problem, we propose Harness-G, a graph-structured retrieval framework that redesigns this interface. It reformulates free-form query generation as finite action selection: the policy selects an evidence sentence or entity, or chooses to answer, while the environment constructs the menu, tracks retrieval state, and validates and executes each choice. This interface reduces linguistic aliasing and makes same-state alternatives directly comparable. Building on this interface, we introduce Structured Non-myopic Credit (SNC), which uses a frozen answer scorer to compare the selected action with its alternatives and assigns downstream gains to the earlier actions that enabled them. Across six QA benchmarks, Harness-G achieves the highest average F1 at both evaluated model scales, outperforming the strongest baseline, Graph-R1, by 10.74 points at 1.5B and 3.98 points at 3B.
Yanning Hou, Hao-Yuan Chen, Sihang Zhou et al.· 0 citations
Deep-research agents answer complex user questions through an iterative sequence of search steps, where the agent autonomously formulates sub-queries to retrieve the evidence needed at each stage. However, existing retriever training typically relies only on the sub-query and its corresponding search results at the current step as training signals, leaving the information accumulated from previous interactions largely underutilized. We introduce iter, an agent interaction-aware dense retriever trained using agent trajectory learning signals. iter represents each query by incorporating not only the current sub-query, but also the main question and preceding sub-queries, and is trained using trajectory-relative learning signals derived from the agent's interactions. Across six agent backbones from three model families, iter consistently outperforms the existing agent-trajectory-trained dense retriever, LRAT, achieving an average improvement of 7.5% on InfoSeek-Eval and 13.5% on BrowseComp-Plus. iter also demonstrates stronger cross-agent robustness than AgentIR, a deep-research retriever that relies on external LLM-judge signals and the agent's pre-search reasoning. Ablations further show that the main question and previous sub-queries provide the most robust query representation, while previously visited and useful documents, used as redundancy negatives in subsequent searches, provide the strongest trajectory-relative supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/ielab/ITER.
Haodong Chen, Shuai Wang, Yu Yin et al.· 0 citations
Search Agents face a severe reliability crisis during reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. Heuristic Top-K retrieval often causes critical evidence loss or noise inclusion, while over-confidence induced by progressive RL leads to hallucinated answers and redundant searches. To build highly reliable agents, we introduce Conformal Prediction (CP) and propose Conformalized Agentic Search (CAS). This framework establishes reliability guarantees on both the retrieval and training sides: on the retrieval side, an Adaptive Prediction Set (APS), a specific CP realization, translates statistical coverage into dynamic document truncation to construct prediction sets that are adaptive in size; on the training side, Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI), a dynamic CP algorithm, dynamically constructs prediction sets with controllable coverage to quantify answer confidence, which is then used to penalize low-confidence trajectories within the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) objective, ensuring the model learns only from reliable ones. Experiments across single-hop and multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves reasoning accuracy while drastically reducing redundant tool invocations, establishing a highly reliable and efficient agent paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/S1llyBird/CAS.
Zixi Zhu, Jiayuan Su, Jian Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Retrieval is the first stage of modern search and advertising systems, selecting a candidate set from a large item universe for downstream ranking and auction. Recent work increasingly leverages LLMs to improve retrieval through query expansion, data synthesis, and retrieval-feedback training. However, the generative component is typically used for query-side augmentation, while final matching is still delegated to a downstream retriever. We introduce CoGR, a retrieval framework that instead trains LLMs to directly construct retrieval representations on both query and item sides. Each generator produces a compact set of keywords, which are matched directly through an inverted index, preserving compatibility with existing keyword-based retrieval infrastructure. CoGR uses a two-stage training pipeline. Supervised fine-tuning first establishes an aligned keyword space, after which co-evolving reinforcement learning alternately optimizes the query- and item-side generators with GRPO against the opposite side's frozen index. Both sides optimize the same query-to-item retrieval $F_1$ objective: the query side receives retrieval $F_1$ directly, while the item side receives a counterfactual marginal reward measuring the change in query-side $F_1$ caused by its generated keywords. Across 10 representative sparse, dense, and generative baselines, CoGR achieves the best performance on both an internal APP Marketplace dataset and the public WANDS benchmark, improving $F_1$ over the strongest baseline by $10.9\%$ and $36.1\%$, respectively. Further analysis shows stable co-evolution and increasingly aligned query--item keyword spaces over training.
Runpeng Dai, Kai-Li Huang, Changsung Kang et al.· 0 citations
River, a simple training recipe that improves reward quality by filtering low-quality environments and augmenting outcome rewards with process-level behavior regularization is proposed, which achieves the best performance among evaluated open-source RL-trained 8B models across four terminal-agent benchmarks.
Yi-Fan Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan-Phi Nguyen et al.· 0 citations
E-commerce search ranking models face the challenging and critical problem of balancing strict real-time latency constraints with the need for high-quality relevance predictions. In production environments, ranking models often rely primarily on product titles, which frequently omit critical attributes required to satisfy diverse query intents. While full product descriptions provide richer information, their length and verbosity make them computationally impractical for real-time ranking, particularly when using cross-encoder architectures. To address this challenge, we propose ReLSum, a reinforcement learning framework that generates concise, relevance-optimized product summaries for search ranking. ReLSum directly aligns summarization with the ranking objective by using downstream relevance scores as reward signals. The framework conditions the Large Language Model (LLM) solely on product information, while queries are used only to compute rewards during training. This design enables summaries to be generated and cached offline, ensuring no additional inference latency at serving time. Experiments on large-scale production data show substantial improvements in offline NDCG and recall. In online A/B tests, ReLSum delivers statistically significant gains in user engagement metrics such as orders per visitor and units per completed order, with particularly strong improvements for tail queries.
